Along a dusty track in Sri Lanka’s war-torn Jaffna peninsula thousands of people are shuffling to polling booths for the first time in 20 years.
Crossing 400m of no-man’s-land, a makeshift road flanked by minefields and coconut palms that divides two communities within one country, are the world’s newest electorate: Tamils from Sri Lanka’s north and east.
Effectively disenfranchised by two decades of civil war, more than 25 000 people spent the night camped on the border of Eelam, the name given to the ”liberated” portion of Sri Lanka, waiting patiently for dawn to break and the voting to begin.
Despite living in a self-declared ministate run by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Tamils, who make up three million of Sri Lanka’s 19-million population, on Friday sought to elect representatives to a Parliament that has little say over their lives.
In Eelam, the dark olive fatigues of Sri Lanka’s army give way to the light-blue uniforms of the LTTE’s police. Here the Tamil Tigers collect taxes and operate courts. They run a de facto country.
”The whole process has been very difficult. We had to stay the night and travel all day. But I have come with the aim of bringing the Tamils to power,” said Sasikumar (28), a first-time voter at the polling station in Muhamalai — a town where the writ of the Sri Lankan government peters out and LTTE-run Eelam begins.
The parliamentary elections, the third in four years, are a result of a power struggle between the President, Chandrika Kumaratunga and the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe.
They are in dispute on who is best suited to conduct peace negotiations with the LTTE, a separatist group that launched a war for independence in 1983 claiming it was discriminated against by the majority Buddhist Sinhalese population. The ensuing violence claimed 65 000 lives before a ceasefire brokered by Norway stopped the violence in 2002.
This election also marks a new phase in the LTTE’s thinking. For the first time it has openly backed a political party, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), in national elections.
Given that most opinion polls indicate that neither Wickremesinghe’s United National Party, nor the president’s coalition, the Freedom Alliance, will get an absolute majority in the 225-seat Parliament, smaller parties — like the TNA, which hopes to get 20 seats — look certain to be power brokers.
Suresh Premachandran, the convener of the TNA in Jaffna, said: ”The LTTE are changing and they are getting involved in politics. In these elections, the Tamils have united and will be the third force in Sri Lankan politics. We think that there will be a hung Parliament and that whatever government is formed will need the support of the TNA.”
But cracks have appeared in the LTTE’s front. Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, a military strategist whose nom de guerre is Colonel Karuna, split from the LTTE and demanded his own administration in the east to prevent discrimination by northern Tamils.
The LTTE’s response was swift: it said it would ”get rid of traitors”.
This week a TNA candidate thought to be loyal to Col Karuna was assassinated. But LTTE chiefs say there is ”no split between the north and the east”.
Since September 11 when the United States and Britain classified it as a terrorist group, the LTTE has been keen to present itself to the international community as a willing partner in peace. It has abandoned its demand for a separate country for the Tamils and will settle for regional autonomy, or ”internal self-determination”.
The question of how to reintegrate two nations into one country under one Constitution is at the heart of the elections. The president and the prime minister have said they want to reform the Constitution, but analysts say this may not mean that the Tamils will get want they want: a federal form of government.
More worrying is religious revivalism in Sri Lanka. More than 75% of Sri Lankans are Buddhist and for the first time the Buddhist clergy, campaigning as the National Heritage Party, are contesting elections and talks of expelling Indian workers and clearing out mosques and churches. The monks are expected to get five seats. — Guardian Unlimited Â