Troops out in force as Sri Lanka goes to polls
The Sri Lankan military today began deploying soldiers to help police maintain security on the eve of parliamentary elections that could result in a hung Parliament with no clear winner.
An inconclusive election outcome is likely to complicate efforts to end the island country’s 20-year-old civil war with Tamil Tiger rebels.
“We have started deploying soldiers at many places to assist police to maintain law and order,” military spokesman Colonel Sumeda Perera said in Colombo.
The soldiers are being deployed heavily in the Tamil-majority eastern town of Batticaloa, where a Tamil candidate was fatally shot on Tuesday, he said.
The latest opinion poll shows President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s United People’s Freedom Alliance is likely to win 101 seats in the 225-seat Parliament, against 99 seats for Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Alliance.
The survey by Org-Smart Opinion Polls indicates that neither side is likely to receive a clear mandate to carry forward the peace process.
That would force the two main parties to make deals with smaller parties: led by Buddhist monks, Muslims, or the Tamil Tigers’ proxy party – the Tamil National Alliance.
A fragile truce is holding between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels, who fought a bloody two-decade civil war to try to carve out a separate homeland for minority ethnic Tamils because of alleged discrimination by the Sinhalese majority.
The Tamil National Alliance could become a kingmaker if the two main political blocs fail to win a clear victory.
The Tamil party, however, is split between candidates backing a breakaway rebel leader and those supporting the mainstream rebel movement.
The Buddhist monks’ party is expected to receive many Buddhist Sinhalese votes and win at least a few seats in Parliament. The monks are bitterly opposed to any concessions to the 3.2 million Tamils, who are mainly Hindu.
The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, which is also divided, could also play an important role. The party used to have five seats and was an ally of Wickremesinghe, but recently split.
The prime minister currently holds parliamentary power in a coalition with one faction of that party, along with a number of smaller parties.
Political violence has been rising in recent days, although it is far less rampant than in the last election in 2001, when dozens were killed in political attacks.
The Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, a group overseeing the polling, has reported 1,485 incidents of violence so far, including five deaths.
The election is being fought mainly on the issue of how peace negotiations with the rebels should be handled. Kumaratunga, who lost an eye in a Tamil Tiger suicide attack, has accused Wickremesinghe of accepting too many of the rebels’ demands.
