Reuters India – Preview – After Sri Lanka’s war, victors vie for presidency
by C. Bryson Hull
Sri Lanka’s first post-war presidential election due on Tuesday has turned into a violent contest between two former allies who led the nation to victory over the Tamil Tigers but who are now bitter political foes.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa is facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from General Sarath Fonseka, who as army commander led a relentless campaign to crush the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) three-decade separatist insurgency.
On Tuesday, polls open for an election in which nearly 14.1 million people are registered to vote. More than 68,000 police will be deployed to protect polling stations and there are fears voting day could be bloody.
There is little difference between the Rajapaksa and Fonseka campaign platforms, both of which are heavy on populist subsidies, pledges of pay raises to Sri Lanka’s bloated public sector and promises of rural development. More
AFP - Tense peace reigns as Sri Lanka heads to polls
by Amal Jayasinghe
War-scarred Sri Lanka holds a peace-time presidential election this week after a bitter and highly personal campaign between the architects of the crushing of an almost four-decade-long insurgency.
President Mahinda Rajapakse will face his former army chief Sarath Fonseka on Tuesday in an intriguing contest between two men who were victorious allies on the battlefield last year but are now sworn enemies at the ballot box.
There are no reliable opinion polls in the country and political observers say the election is too close to call. Both camps believe they can claim a majority in the voting by the 14.08-million-strong electorate.
Rajapakse and Fonseka wiped out the Tamil Tiger rebels in May last year, ending their 37-year violent struggle for a Tamil homeland that left between 80,000 and 100,000 people dead, according to UN estimates. More
ABC News – Campaigning ends ahead of Sri Lanka election
By South Asia correspondent Sally Sara and wires
Opposition activists say the Sri Lankan government is planning to use vote rigging and violence to win the presidential election, as campaigning officially ends.
The two main candidates in the poll, President Mahinda Rajapakse and former army chief General Sarath Fonseca have held their final campaign rallies ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
Both are closely associated with the defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels.
Looking tired after a heavy campaign schedule, Mr Rajapakse wowed the large but somewhat regimented crowd of supporters, who cheered politely but not wildly.
As always, he spoke of last year’s war victory against the Tamil Tigers, and the need to fight corruption.
With music and fireworks, the president’s team say they’re already celebrating certain victory.
But General Fonseca says the ruling party is planning to use violence and vote rigging to disrupt the poll. More
Hindustan Times – Sri Lanka’s war allies turn enemies
by Amal Jayasinghe, Agence France-Presse
Sri Lanka’s election this week features two men who emerged victorious on the battlefield of a civil war, but have since become bitter political enemies.
President Mahinda Rajapakse, a veteran streetfighter politician who entered parliament aged 24, is taking on his former army chief Sarath Fonseka, a political novice who stepped down last year after being sidelined.
Rajapakse handpicked Fonseka for the top military role soon after he won his first term in 2005 and lauded him as the “best army commander in the world” last year in the afterglow of their victory over Tamil Tiger rebels.
But their friendship soured over who should take the most credit for winning the conflict amid suspicion that Fonseka was becoming too powerful and might even stage a coup. More
Al Jazzera English – Sri Lanka Candidates trade barbs
With Sri Lankans set to elect a new president on Tuesday, the country’s political temperature is rising.
It is for the first time in decades that the country is holding a vote free from the spectre of a long civil war, which ended last year with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist group fighting for an independent state for minority Tamils.
But the election campaign has been vicious and often violent, with several activitists drawn from rival political camps being killed. Read more and watch news report
Arab News – Editorial: Sri Lanka elections
On Tuesday Sri Lankans will elect a president. Their choice is between the incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa who called the elections two years early in the wake of last year’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers and retired army chief Sarath Fonseka, the general who was instrumental in bringing about the rout of the rebels.
This is without doubt a highly important election. The man who wins will face the immense challenge of rebuilding the peace after quarter of a century of merciless ethnic conflict that cost at least 70,000 lives. On the face of it, the incumbent looks best placed to deliver. Rajapaksa is a seasoned politician with a relatively united political party United People’s Freedom Alliance behind him. Fonseka, by contrast, almost makes a merit of the fact that he is not a politician. The implication is that he is not tainted by allegations of corruption, specifically those that have swirled around the incumbent and his immediate family. More
World Socialist Web Site (23/01) - Sri Lankan union endorses SEP presidential candidate
The Executive Committee of the Central Bank Employees Union (CBEU) passed a resolution, January 15, to endorse the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) candidate Wije Dias in Sri Lanka’s January 26 presidential election.
The resolution by one of the country’s leading trade unions supporting the election campaign and political perspective of the SEP provides a guide for the rest of the working class in the island: the working class must organize under the leadership of the SEP to fight back against the attack that will be launched on its social conditions and democratic rights whichever capitalist candidate, either the incumbent Mahinda Rajapakse or the former army commander Sarath Fonseka, wins the election.
For several decades, the CBEU membership has continuously elected members of the SEP and its forerunner, the Revolutionary Communist League, to leading positions. Under their leadership the CBEU has opposed the anti-Tamil war—even after the LTTE mounted a criminal attack on the CBEU headquarters in 1996 that killed scores of workers—and stood for the unity of all working people, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim, in the struggle for a socialist alternative to the capitalist rule. More
The Washington Post (23/01) – Sri Lankan ruling party plans violence: opposition
by Fisnik Abrashi, Associated Press
The accusation came on the last day of bitter campaigning between the two main architects of last year’s victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels – the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa and former army chief Sarath Fonseka – who are vying for the presidency at Tuesday’s vote.
Election-related violence has marred the campaign for weeks. Five people have been killed and 78 wounded since December, according to a local group tracking the violence. More
The Sunday Times (24/01) – FOCUS on Rights
By Kishali Pinto Jayawardene
As Sri Lanka goes to the polls on Tuesday in what is one of the most decisive elections post-independence, there is one certainty for which all of us need to be thankful for regardless of whoever may be the victor. This certainty is that an almost unchallengeable juggernaut Rajapaksa Presidency has been shaken to its very marrow by the range and forcefulness of the challenges mounted against it. I am not talking here only of political challenges but also of reenergized public opinion which is now reflecting issues and questions concerning our political systems and governance processes which would have seemed quite unthinkable just a few months back.
Despite the vicious mud slinging and the upsurge in electoral violence, this is perhaps a most positive feature regarding the upcoming elections. And notwithstanding persisting cynicism regarding the virtually overnight transformation of a hardline army commander to a liberal unifier of a once fractured opposition as its common candidate, I am, (as a citizen of this country who will insist on casting my vote Tuesday hence), insensibly grateful for this interjection of a strong counter into a hitherto cowed and subjugated polity.
Electoral paradoxes and government hypocrisy
There is, after all, little quarrel with the proposition that in the absence of a strong counter, this month’s election would have been a given for the incumbent President. We would see continued disregard of constitutional safeguards ensuring principled governance and further extreme repression of the media. Lofty Presidential pronouncements that there are no more minorities or a majority in Sri Lanka would be belied by (to mention one existing example) the sentencing of an ethnic Tamil to twenty years imprisonment primarily for the sin of writing and publishing commentaries critical of government policy in the war theatre. It took a strongly contested election to release JS Tissainayagam in bail and to ‘resettle” thousands of internally displaced persons living in the mud on welfare camps. What better message these acts may have conveyed if they had been engaged in voluntarily by the government without being virtually bulldozed into so doing by opposition demands? More
Times Online (22/01) - Sri Lanka locked in dirtiest election for years as poll violence rises
by Ralph Michael
It was just before dawn yesterday when the bomb exploded in front of Tiran Alles’s villa in Colombo, signalling a new low in one of the dirtiest elections in Sri Lanka’s history.
By the time he rushed from his bedroom at the back of the house, the entire façade was in flames, as was his Toyota saloon in the forecourt. “Shocking,” Mr Alles, 49, told The Times as police examined the wreckage. “There’ll be more violence like this before polling day.”
Until the Tamil Tigers’ defeat in May few would have doubted that the rebels were behind an attack like this on an ethnic Sinhalese businessman. This time, the finger of suspicion points in a different direction.
Mr Alles is a key supporter of Sarath Fonseka, the former army chief, who led the campaign against the Tigers but is now challenging President Rajapaksa in an election on Tuesday. More
