 Mr Wickremesinghe (l) and President Rajapakse piictured by the Daily Mirror newspaper earlier this week. |
Even as speculation mounted on a rapprochement between their leaders, Sri Lanka’s two main Sinhala parties this week waged a war of words, accusing each other of being soft on the Tamil Tigers.
President Mahinda Rajapakse of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was scheduled to meet Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP) this week to work out a joint approach to for a "sustainable peace" – in other words, how to tackle the LTTE.
The meeting comes in the context of Rajapakse’s declaration before the November 17 Presidential polls in which he defeated Wickremesinghe that he would seek a southern consensus on the ethnic question.
It also comes after Wickremesinghe’s efforts ahead of the elections, in anticipation of him winning, to explore collaboration with then outgoing President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the SLFP leader.
Rajapakse, who was elected on a hardline Sinhala nationalist platform which rejected Norwegian facilitation for talks with the LTTE and a commitment to a unitary state is under international pressure to ditch his erstwhile allies, the ultra nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Perumana (JVP) and the hardline monks party, the JHU.
Rajapakse met recently with both parties, which had been crucial to his sweeping victory amongst the Sinhala voters – although he defeated Wickremesinghe by only three percent, the latter’s tally relied heavily on Upcountry Tamil and Muslim votes, the island’s Tamils having followed an LTTE call for a boycott of the vote.
It is not clear what the terms of a united approach by Sri Lanka’s two main parties might be, but political analysts said the UNP would in all probability insist on a commitment to a federal solution which would maintain Sri Lanka’s unity.
Whilst the SLFP consistently trod a Sinhala nationalist platform before the elections, it was hurried joined by the UNP in the two weeks immediately before November 17 polls. Some southern analysts argue however that the SLFP and UNP are broadly in agreement on the need for devolution.
The UNP says it is amenable to a federal solution, albeit one that falls far short of Tamil expectations of power sharing, but Rajapakse has rejected the notion out of hand, in deference to his JVP and JHU allies.
Rajapakse’s SLFP heads a minority government and desperately needs other parties support for any Parliamentary action. If he is to abandon his pre-election pacts with the JVP and JHU, he will need the support of the UNP.
However a war of words between the two longstanding rival parties continued this week with the General Secretary of the ruling SLFP, Maitripala Sirisena writing to the UNP, accusing it of signing a ceasefire with the LTTE and then tolerating the Tigers’ breaches during its term in office.
Sirisena was responding to a letter by UNP Deputy General Secretary, Tissa Attanayake, which boasted about how the Tigers had condemned the UNP as inimical to their interests and accused the SLFP of allowing the security situation to deteriorate.
Sirisena wrote to Wickremesinghe: “when the LTTE continuously violated the CFA, firstly as the Prime Minister and then as the opposition leader you never condemned such terrorist acts but indirectly you attempted to justify them.”
Responding, Attanayake said: “although there are no face to face battles between the LTTE and security forces attacks are being launched through civilians as in the case of Palestine. On various occasions the UNP had pointed out the danger involved. Our leader, and the deputy leader had condemned the assassinations in the North.”
“On November 26, [LTTE leader] Prabhakaran in his Heroes Day address said that Ranil Wickremesinghe’s government did not fulfill the human needs of the Tamil community but made an attempt to lay a international net. On December 06, Anton Balasingham referred Ranil as a dangerous hypocrite,” Attanayake said in reference to how the LTTE was vilifying his party.