Warring Parties
	Mutual loathing between the President and the Prime Minister is imperiling Sri Lanka's delicate peace
	By Alex Perry Colombo

	ERANGA JAYAWARDENA/AP PM Wickremesinghe says that an upcoming electoral faceoff with Kumaratunga will decide the future of Sri Lanka

Posted Monday, March 22, 2004; 21:00 HKT
The truly great, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga appears to believe, should be truly late. By the time her cortege nears Sri Lanka's ancient royal capital of Anuradhapura, the crowd of 15,000 she has summoned to kick off her party's general-election campaign has been waiting for three hours in the baking sun. Inside the city's sports stadium, hundreds of people are squatting in clusters under a handful of umbrellas, while thousands more have surrendered to the heat and are lying in the dust. Exhausted party aides who finished their speeches hours ago have, for the last hour, been playing old reel-to-reel tapes of addresses by the President's parents, both former Prime Ministers. Suddenly a BMW with tinted windows roars through the gates. A matronly figure in a cobalt blue sari emerges and bustles toward the stage. "Madam is here!" shouts the announcer. "I didn't mean to keep you waiting," begins Kumaratunga as she reaches the microphone, "but there are people trying to kill me."

While the statement lacks something as an apology, there's no doubting its veracity. Sri Lankan politics are ruthless and bloody, and as a member of the country's leading political family, Kumaratunga and her kin have been marked for death many times. Her father was assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959, Marxist revolutionaries are thought to have murdered her husband in 1988, and Kumaratunga lost her right eye in a 1999 suicide bomb attack by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.). And while an uneasy peace has prevailed between the government and the Tigers since 2002, Kumaratunga has remained a target because of her imperial and mercurial style. "She's Joan of Arc, Boadicea and Elizabeth I all rolled into one," says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, an analyst at the Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA) in Colombo. "And it can really infuriate people."

Few people have more reason to feel angry today than her own Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe. In the past five months, Kumaratunga has used her constitutional powers to seize his government while he was on a visit to Washington; dissolve Parliament; stall Wickremesinghe's negotiations to end a civil war with the Tigers that, with 65,000 dead in 20 years, is Asia's bloodiest and most intractable; and call a snap general election to try to unseat him. Like the crowd at Anuradhapura, the country has been hostage to Madam's whims as she plunged from controversy to controversy, ordering the army to seize the state media, castigating Norway's peace mediators, even deciding unilaterally to add another year to her term as President. Now, with a parliamentary election scheduled for April 2, Kumaratunga's Sri Lanka Freedom Party is set to go head-to-head with Wickremesinghe's United National Party at the ballot box. At stake is control of the government, the peace process and the economy. As Wickremesinghe puts it, the voting "will decide the future of Sri Lanka."

Thanks to the cease-fire, the Sri Lankan economy is expected to grow by a healthy 6% this year. But Kumaratunga's power play has stalled the peace talks, jeopardizing vital foreign investment in infrastructure and sparking fears that the country could slip back into disarray. In a March report, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned, "A prolonged impasse resulting from the ongoing political instability could hold back private investment and delay donor financing." The country's leaders, it continued, "need to make further progress in establishing a political environment that fosters lasting peace." The IMF delayed an $80 million aid tranche after the recent turmoil.

In an interview with TIME, Kumaratunga, 58, says she seized the government because Wickremesinghe's peace negotiations were a "farce." She accuses the Prime Minister of making "secret promises" to L.T.T.E. leaders that threatened to split the country between Sinhalese south and Tamil northeast. Both Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe are willing to concede the Tamils greater political autonomy by creating a federalist system of government. But Kumaratunga charges, with some justification, that the rebels were using the cease-fire to recruit and rearm. "Everybody is very happy there are no bombs going off and people in the north are happy their children are not dying," Kumaratunga says. "But people in the south are very worried about the way the peace process was handled."

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	What's Her Game? [Nov. 11, 2003] A sudden power grab by Sri Lanka's President threatens to plunge the country back into civil war Peace Dividend [Nov. 03, 2003] A cease-fire in Sri Lanka's civil war has triggered a robust economic revival. Can the good times last? Tiger Tamer [Nov. 03, 2003] Interview with the Prime Minister Waiting to Exhale [Mar. 03, 2003] The cease-fire in Sri Lanka has lasted a year. So where is the peace dividend? More Related Items | Search all issues of TIME Magazine