President Kumaratunga to face popularity test in March

By Mohan Samarasinghe

COLOMBO (IPS): Sri Lanka's government faces its first popularity test next month in local government elections that could decide the fate also of President Chandrika Kumaratunga's peace package for the war-torn north.

The elections, which have been postponed three times by the ruling People's Alliance government under emergency regulations that govern the island, are to be held on Mar. 27.

Campaigning has begun, and the opposition United National Party (UNP) which controls 75 percent of the provincial governments is hoping to retain control despite the publication last week of a report linking the 1988 killing of President Kumaratunga's husband to UNP leaders.

The findings of a commission set up by Kumaratunga, which was released to the media by the president herself, has implicated Sri Lanka's late President Ranasinghe Premadasa, and the late Deputy Defense Minister Ranjan Wijeratne.

A popular actor turned politician, Vijaya Kumaratunga was gunned down by two men on a motorcycle at his residence in a Colombo suburb on Feb. 16, 1988, just days before he was to be nominated by his United Socialist Alliance to run for the presidential election later that year on a broad left ticket.

UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, when contacted by IPS, said the party would comment on the report after studying it closely. "We are reserving comment till we have all the facts," Wickremesinghe said. "It looks to me like the mud-slinging has begun all over again," Wickremesinghe added.

Kumaratunga, who came to power promising to end state- sponsored terrorism, has time and again accused the UNP of blatant human rights violations and killing political opponents. Last Friday, she said the UNP's "reign of state terror was ended within 24 hours" after she came to power.

Wickremesinghe himself is being investigated by a commission appointed by Kumaratunga to look into the disappearances of youth during the leftist uprising in the late 1980s.

UNP members have complained that the president was on a political witch-hunt, appointing commissions as a means of politically destroying her opponents. They have threatened to withdraw parliamentary support for a crucial peace plan proposed by Kumaratunga's People's Alliance government aimed at ending the country's war with separatist guerrillas.

Kumaratunga needs the support of the UNP, which holds 85 seats in Sri Lanka's 225-seat parliament, to make her peace plan offering substantial devolution to minority Tamils a reality. The plan is now being discussed by a Parliamentary Select Committee and is expected to be presented for a vote in the house in April.

The plan then has to be passed at a nationwide referendum before its proposals can be enshrined in the Constitution. Analysts here say a victory for the ruling alliance will be seen as a public endorsement for the peace plan and would put more pressure on the UNP to vote for it.

UNP's Wickremesinghe said he was "not concerned" about the commission report. "We are not concerned. We have our political agenda and we feel comfortable going to the people with it," he said.

The commission's 85-page report states: "Former President Ranasinghe Premadasa is implicated by evidence of a motive for the assassination of Vijaya Kumaratunga. He is also implicated by circumstantial evidence of the suppression of the investigation into the assassination."

It adds: "Former Minister of State for Defense Ranjan Wijeratne illegally and improperly interfered in the conduct of the investigation. He is also implicated by circumstantial evidence of suppression of the investigation. There is no evidence of motive against him."

"It was suggested that the motive for the assassination of Vijaya Kumaratunga was that he became a formidable rival to Prime Minister Premadasa at the presidential stakes," the report says.

Premadasa was killed by a suspected separatist Tamil Tiger suicide bomber at the UNP's May Day rally in 1993 in downtown Colombo. Wijeratne was killed by a bomb exploded by suspected Tamil rebels in Colombo in March 1991.

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is fighting for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in this predominantly Sinhalese Indian Ocean island's north and east. The government says more than 50,000 people have been killed in the war, now in its 14th year.

Kumaratunga told a news conference in Colombo recently that her husband Vijaya's campaign for president had gathered momentum and that he had won the support of his party as well as that of other parties.

"(The commission) has quite clearly stated that (the killing of Vijaya) was a politically motivated action," Kumaratunga said. "They have definitely pointed their fingers at two individuals."

The then ruling UNP government blamed the killing on left-wing JVP (People's Liberation Front) insurgents who launched an abortive insurrection in the south of the country.