Burning issues facing Sri

Lanka ahead of January polls

COLOMBO, 16
December 2014 (IRIN) - As Sri Lanka gears up for a presidential election five
years after the end a long separatist rebellion, the country, especially the
war-scarred North, faces a raft of unresolved chronic problems. Analysts
regard many of them as long-term drivers of conflict.

The front-runners in the January poll are incumbent President Mahinda

Rajapaksa, who is seeking an unprecedented third term (thanks to a
constitutional amendment passed by the ruling United Peoples Freedom
Alliance (UPFA), and his former minister of health, Maithripala Sirisena. Both
are southerners.
Neither candidate has released his campaign platform. In Sri Lankas former
war zone in the North, there is widespread apprehension that post-war
issues are unlikely to take top-billing.
It is an election dictated by two personalities from the majority community
influenced by issues current to the majority community. So far we have not
seen either of them showing any signs that they are sensitive to the issues
of the minorities, said Ponnadurai Balasundarampillai, the former vice
chancellor of Jaffna University in northern Jaffna.

Whoever wins in January, core questions around national identity - issues

ofdevolution of power, of accountability and reconciliation, and of the equal
status of Tamils and Muslims in a Sinhala majority state - will remain
contentious. They will require deft handling if greater instability is not to
result, the International Crisis Group warned in a recent report.
If any new president wants to bring normalcy back to the North, then he
should be prepared to take decisions that have been long overdue, said
Balasundarampillai.
He added that given the southern background of the two leading
candidates, chances of such major policy changes taking place soon were
slim.
For a Southern leader, these decisions are not as simple or straightforward
as they appear in the North, said Balasundarampillai,said
Balasundarampillai, who lived through the 26-year war in northern Jaffna
and is one of the regions most prominent political analysts. He said
Southern politicians historically take a hardline stance against power
devolution in favour of a powerful national government.
IRIN talked to a number of experts to summarize leading concerns ahead of
the 8 January presidential poll.
The Norths economy - In the three districts that bore the worst of
fighting, the poverty rate is more than twice the national rate of 6.7 percent
(Mullaithivu 28 percent [a national high], Kilinochchi 12.7 percent and
Mannar 20.1 percent). Unemployment rates also remain similarly high.
One of the primary reasons for the very limited improvements in the
livelihoods of the people in the North and East is the severe limitations
imposed on the operations of NGOs - local, national, and international - as a
result of the security phobia of the state in the aftermath of the civil war,
said Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, who heads the Point Pedro Institute of
Development in Jaffna.

Photo: Amantha Perera/ IRIN

Despite a new multi-billion dollar rail link that restores service to the former
war zone, most of Northern Province is cut off from economic progress
National reconciliation - More than five years after the end of the conflict, a
root cause for the bloodshed, the demand for more regional power, remains
unaddressed. The victory of Tamil National Alliance (TNA) at the September
2013 Northern Provincial Council election was seen by many as an
overwhelming endorsement by the northern population of the TNAs
demand for more autonomy. However, the Provincial Council and Colombo
remain at loggerheads on almost everything, with a governor (former highranking military official) appointed by the president accused of clipping the
Councils powers.
Accounting for the missing - Since the end of the war, the number of
those missing ranges from 16,000 to more than 40,000. However, there has
been no systematic mechanism to trace. The International Committed for
the Red Cross has just begun a nationwide survey of the families of the
missing.
Single female-headed families - There are at least 40,000 families led
bywar widows in Northern Province. Few programmes have targeted these
women, and international assistance is waning.
Religious/ethnic tensions - Communal tensions have been rising between
hardline Buddhist groups and Muslims in some parts of Sri Lanka. In June
this year, violence in Dharga Town, about 60km south of Colombo, resulted
in two deaths and at least 80 injured. Though the North has been so far
spared such clashes, there is fear among civilians that any aggressive
campaigning for more regional powers could result in similar backlashes.
The recent communal riots did not in any way do any good to whatever
trust [there was] on the government that remained with northern civilian
population, said Ponnadurai Balasundarampillai, former vice chancellor of

Jaffna University in northern Jaffna, heart of the former conflict zone.

Permanent housing gap - In early 2014, officials said US$300 million was
needed to build 63,000 new houses destroyed by the war out of a total
caseload of 138,651. There has not been any large infusion of funding for
such projects this year.
Refugees in India - Over 100,000 Sri Lanka refugees are in India; returns
have been very slow since the end of the war and are estimated to number
nearly 20,000. The new government must decide whether to bring them
home or negotiate a permanent solution with India.
Protracted IDPs - While the government has declared there are no more
internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka, informal community
estimates place the number of those unable to return to their previous
homes and still living with host families close to 80,000.
At an election in southeastern Uva Province held in September to elect the
provincial council, the ruling (UPFA) mustered 51 percent of the vote, a
sharp drop from the 72 percent it received in the same province in 2009. In
contrast, the opposition United National Party won 40 percent of the vote
versus its earlier 22 percent.
The separatist conflict was fought primarily along ethnic lines that pitted
the countrys Buddhist Sinhala majority against an ethnic Tamil minority. In
recent years, the rise of a small number of Buddhist fundamentalist
groups has placed further strain on that historical divide.
And while examples of grassroots reconciliation can be found nationwide NGO-sponsored home visits of families across ethnic divides; Tamil police
officers holding language training for their Sinhala-speaking counterparts;
seed exchanges taking place between farmers from the Tamil-dominated
north and Sinhala-dense south - calls to investigate alleged war-time
abuses, account for the missing and act on a government-appointed panels
reconciliation recommendations continue to mount.
Balasundarampillai said widespread unemployment and poverty are likely
deciding factors in the upcoming election. Of the countrys 14 million
registered voters last year, some 719,000 were in Northern Province.
Economists have criticized the governments nearly $3 billion investment in
physical infrastructure in the north as failing to boost local employment,
especially among youths and women.
The economist Sarvananthans research has concluded that whilst the

construction sub-sector expanded by 56.6 percent in monetary value

between 2011 and 2012 in the North, employment expanded by only 5.3
percent. In contrast, whilst the monetary value of the construction subsector expanded by nearly 40 percent between 2010 and 2012 in the
Southern Province, the employed population in the same sub-sector in the
same time period grew by 37.1 percent.
ap/pt/cb
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