COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s future rests precariously on the outcome of the Nov. 17 presidential election, the nation’s fourth political contest within five years.

Though a three-and-a-half year truce between the government and separatist Tamil Tigers has held since February 2002, negotiations stalled in April 2003, when the latter pulled out. Relations between the two sides have been on the slide after the current United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) government took office in April 2004 and have come close to ending several times.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) the rebels’ formal name, has criticised the government for helping a rebellion launched by renegade separatist commander Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, alias Karuna. Several high-ranking Tigers leaders have been killed in the internecine clashes.

The UPFA has also been unable to build on goodwill generated in response to last year’s horrific tsunami in order to effectively implement an aid sharing deal with the Tigers, who are fighting to carve out a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east of the island.

About 70 per cent of Sri Lanka’s 19 million population is Sinhala Buddhist, while 18 per cent is Tamil, mainly Hindu, and another 7.5 per cent Muslim. Christians, both Tamils and Sinhalese, constitute about eight per cent of the island’s people. The August murder of former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in Colombo saw the government pointing the finger at the Tigers and calling on international players to exert pressure on the group, chilling the already cool relationship.

“The forthcoming elections are a time of political choice in Sri Lanka. It is natural that there will be vigorous debate on the best way forward in the peace process,” major donors the United States, European Union, Japan and peace facilitators Norway said in a joint statement from New York last week. The four nations, officially known as the Co-chairs of the Tokyo Donor Meeting, also warned that the peace process was facing its most serious challenge since 2002 and asked all parties to act with restraint.

Observers in Colombo say there is very little likelihood of any progress in the talks before the polls. The election announcement seriously diminished chances of meetings between the two parties, Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, a researcher who has worked extensively in Tiger-held areas in the north and east, told IPS. “I do not think there will be any positive move on the peace front until after the presidential elections. Even then, there will not be any talks on the review of the ceasefire agreement,” Sarvananthan said. Momentum for discussions was further weakened by elections in Norway. Chief peace envoy Erik Solheim had taken leave from Sri Lanka’s process to concentrate on campaigning at home when the Kadirgamar assassination took place. However, Norway’s new Labour Party Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has assured Sri Lankans he is committed to the negotiations.

Donor concerns for the future of the longest-running truce in Sri Lanka’s two-decade-old civil conflict have been heightened by the widely divergent policies adopted by the two main candidates. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the contender from outgoing President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s UPFA Party, has made pacts with hard-line southern parties like the People’s Liberation Front (PLF) and the Buddhist monk-led Jathika Hela Urumaya. He has pledged to uphold the unitary nature of the country and to renegotiate the truce.

According to PLF leaders, Rajapakse has also agreed to scrap the tsunami aid-sharing deal with the Tigers promoted by Kumaratunga.

The PLF pulled out of the Kumaratunga administration when the president made the latter deal. The outgoing leader lambasted Rajapakse soon after he signed the pact with the PLF and his aides told IPS that the internal battle has left their candidate severely undermined. Rajapakse’s main rival, opposition leader Ranil Wickremasinghe, has said he would recommence negotiations with the Tigers and try to seek a permanent settlement based on a federal power-sharing mechanism. It was Wickremasinghe who initiated the truce when he was prime minister in 2002. Unlike Rajapakse, who has remained vague about his economic policies, Wickremasinghe has said he would also push ahead with economic liberalisation.

“The battle lines are now drawn,” PLF leader Somawansha Amarasinghe said at Rajapakse’s inaugural rally in Colombo. However the opposition leader received an unexpected boost to his campaign from the donors when they tacitly endorsed the federal based solution.

“The Co-Chairs reiterate that a peaceful resolution of the conflict can only be achieved through a negotiated political settlement that follows the principles agreed in Oslo in December 2002, to explore a solution based on a federal model within a united Sri Lanka,” they said in the message.

Criticised for adopting a hard-line posture, Rajapakse has blamed his ‘war candidate’ tag on bad press and said he is willing to go the extra mile to achieve peace. However his proximity to hawks resisting power sharing has already alienated minority Tamil parties.

MP Suresh Premachandran from the pro-Tiger Tamil National Alliance said that though the party had not reached any conclusions, the alliance was likely to support the candidate pushing for power sharing based on federalism.

The Tigers have remained outside the fray so far, but can exert influence at the polls by controlling the participation of voters in areas under their control on election day. Tiger spokesperson Daya Master said the group would take a decision once the two main candidates release their manifestos later this month.

Despite such focus on the election, a sizeable portion of the 13.3 million eligible voters is visibly disgruntled. “This is not democracy working for the good of the country, this is democracy working at its worst,” Renuka Gunawardena, a public relations officer in Colombo, told IPS.

Her views are shared by many in the country, where voters are usually divided on ethnic, religious and even geographic lines.

“These elections are held because politicians want them, not because people like us want elections,” said Perumal Lawrence, an ethnic Indian Tamil from the central hills. Before Elections Commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake announced the date, the run-up to the election had been full of political scandals and bickering.

The Wickremasinghe-led UNP launched public protests earlier in the year demanding that elections be held in 2005. Those protests were fuelled by Kumaratunga’s stand that her term extended to 2006 due to a secret oath-taking ceremony.—Dawn/Inter-Press News Service