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 Warring Parties
Mutual loathing between the President and the Prime Minister is imperiling Sri Lanka's delicate peace |
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Warring Parties — page 2
Others view Kumaratunga's actions as a naked power grab by an ambitious President who had lost the initiative to a longtime adversary. Wickremesinghe denies the President's accusations, noting that L.T.T.E. leaders had proposed their own federal settlement two days before Kumaratunga took over and scuttled the negotiations. Kumaratunga's own efforts during the mid-1990s to make peace with the Tamils had failed—as the bomb that took her eye illustrated so dramatically—and she bowed out of the process when Wickremesinghe was elected Prime Minister on a peace ticket in December 2001. Her opponents claim that with a breakthrough appearing imminent, she was worried that all credit would go to Wickremesinghe. There was even talk of a Nobel Peace Prize for him. "If we had gone ahead with peace talks and development," says Wickremesinghe, "her party would have lost its chances of winning the next election."
Kumaratunga and Wickremesinghe go back a long way, and their feud is as much personal as political. They knew each other as children, when Wickremesinghe—who is younger than the President by four years—used to play with Kumaratunga's brother in her family's home. But as adults they became political rivals, and Kumaratunga makes no effort to conceal her disdain for her mild-mannered nemesis. Complaining that Wickremesinghe excluded her from peace negotiations despite her requests to be kept informed, she derides him as "a liar ... [BRACKET {who}] has no backbone" and who is "incapable of thinking big." She also fumes about what she sees as his disrespect for her. Wickremesinghe would call her "Madam" to her face, she says, "but sit there in Cabinet with a smirk on his face as his ministers abused me [BRACKET {with}] the most horrendous insults."
To someone who had come to see herself almost as a personification of the nation after terms as Prime Minister and President and 50 years in Sri Lanka's First Family, the perceived slurs were intolerable. "In her mind, her future and the future of her party and the country are all tied together," says Saravanamuttu of CPA. "Hurt one in that context and you hurt them all." Wickremesinghe, who says he would have brought Kumaratunga into the peace process once he had established the outlines of a deal with the Tigers, suggests that the real problem is her ego. "The President has said before that politics and power in Sri Lanka is a Bandaranaike family preserve," he says.
While its leaders feud, the mood of the country is growing increasingly dangerous. Sporadic violence has broken out between supporters of Wickremesinghe and Kumaratunga; a handful of party workers on both sides have even been killed. Intolerance is also filling the vacuum in governance that has accompanied the stalemate: in a spate of recent attacks, Sinhalese Buddhist mobs have burned or vandalized more than 100 Christian churches.
To this uncertainty, the Tigers this month added more with the eruption of a leadership dispute of their own. Colonel Karuna Amman, the top commander for the eastern Tamil Tigers, split from the northern leadership, taking thousands of fighters with him, declaring he could no longer tolerate supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran's one-man rule. This tussle has every chance of turning bloody: in the past, the Tigers executed anyone within their own ranks accused of disloyalty to Prabhakaran.
The confusion and turmoil seem set to continue. Political researchers at Lanka Orix Securities say the most likely outcome of the upcoming election is a deadlock, with neither the Prime Minister's nor the President's party securing an outright majority in the 225-seat Parliament. Lanka Orix predicts Wickremesinghe will then form a government by joining with lawmakers from the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), giving him a majority of votes in Parliament. Once an independent party, the TNA today is little more than a Tiger proxy, however. Diplomats say that while the Tiger's entry into Parliament through the TNA would be a welcome historic step, a government that relies on the Tigers for support while simultaneously negotiating peace with them would raise disturbing questions about the legitimacy of the peace process. Still, Wickremesinghe might have no other choice. He says the idea of forming a national government with Kumaratunga is unworkable because her overriding objective is "to defeat us and not to think about what happens to the country."
Should the election predictions prove correct, leaving Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister, the present impasse will endure. Eventually, Kumaratunga might withdraw from the stage: her second and final term as President ends in 2006, and she hints that she may leave politics after that. But until then, as supporters, enemies and rebels have all come to recognize, Sri Lanka's future will wait on Madam.
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[President Kumaratunga] is Joan of Arc, Boadicea and Elizabeth I all rolled into one. 
