Sri Lankan president looks for coalition partners

The alliance of President Chandrika Kumaratunga emerged as the largest winner in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary elections, but fell eight seats short of a majority and plans to seek a partner to forge a ruling coalition.

An official with Kumaratunga’s United Peoples Freedom Alliance, which secured 105 seats in the 225-member Parliament, said meetings would be held with smaller parties today and that the alliance considered a ruling coalition a certainty.

While Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe could – in theory – forge a coalition to form a new government, his party’s poor showing of just 82 seats made that highly unlikely.

Earlier, Kumaratunga’s top aide said peace talks with the Tamil Tiger rebels were first on her agenda.

“The top priority of the Freedom Alliance is to take steps to resume negotiations” with the Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam, said aide Harim Peiris.

What remains unclear is the direction those talks, on hold for the past year, could take.

While the Tigers have said they would negotiate with whichever political party emerged on top, the President – who was left blind in one eye by a Tiger assassination attempt – has made no secret of her distrust for them.

The Tigers have been divided since the March defection of a powerful guerrilla leader, making any negotiations highly complicated.

A statement on the pro-rebel TamilNet website today warned of a return to violence if their demands to establish a sovereign Tamil state in Sri Lanka were not met.

But a spokesman for the breakaway leader said his wing had no objections to the President’s apparent victory.

“Her alliance has given promises in their manifesto that they will take forward the peace process, and this is good,” said Varathan, a spokesman for the leader known as Karuna.

The Tamil National Alliance, the proxy party of the Tigers, won 22 seats in Friday’s vote. Five of those seats are loyal to the breakaway faction, Varathan said.

Representatives of the main branch of the Tigers could not be reached for comment.

Until the election, talks had been handled by Wickremesinghe, who the President has dismissed as a weak negotiator, willing to cede far too much to the Tigers.

But Peiris insisted yesterday that she wants peace, and that the alliance wants Norway to return as the talks’ facilitator.

Norway brokered the 2002 cease-fire that halted Sri Lanka’s two-decade-old civil war, but their team withdrew at the peak of a power struggle between Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe last year, saying they would return only after the two settled their differences.

But the two long-time rivals failed to stop their bickering, eventually leading to Friday’s snap poll, which came three years ahead of scheduled elections.

The situation is fragile and complex.

A cease-fire has held for two years, but the rebels were stunned when Karuna defected, taking with him some 6,000 guerrillas from the 15,000-strong rebel army.

The main Tiger leadership has warned the government that no negotiations should be held with the breakaway faction.

The Tigers have abandoned their long-standing demand for an independent state, but still want broad autonomy for the minority Tamils, who have long faced discrimination from the Sinhalese.

But Kumaratunga has refused to give them the degree of autonomy they want, demands that would all-but formalise the de facto state they’ve created.

Rounding out the final results, a party led by Buddhist monks took nine seats in Parliament in Friday's vote, and the Sri Lankan Muslim Congress won five. Two small parties took one seat each.