C.V. Wigneswaran, chief minister candidate from the Tamil National Alliance, talks to foreign media as he arrives for an interview at his party office in Jaffna, about 400 kilometers north of Colombo, Sunday. — Reuters JAFFNA — Sri Lanka's main ethnic minority Tamil party secured a landslide victory in a provincial poll that threatens to rekindle animosity between the government and Tamils, four years after the military crushed separatist rebels and ended a 26-year war. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the former political proxy of the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, won 30 seats in the 38-member provincial council in the former northern war zone, election officials said on Sunday. President Mahinda Rajapaksa's ruling coalition won 7 seats, while a Muslim party won one. It was the first provincial council election in the north in 25 years and was held after the government came under international pressure to restore democracy. Defeat for the government, the most humiliating setback for Rajapaksa since he assumed office in 2005, is largely symbolic. But the TNA's victory shows that the defeat of the rebels in 2009 did nothing to subdue calls for autonomy among Tamils, who make up about 14 percent of Sri Lanka's 20 million people. “This is a strong message to the international community to say that Tamils need a political solution,” said a voter in the northern town of Jaffna, computer studies lecturer T. Sivaruban. “It could be a separate state or power sharing within a united Sri Lanka,” said Sivaruban, 33. The TNA won more than 84 percent of the votes in Jaffna, once the heartland of the rebel movement, 81 percent in Kilinochchi, the de-facto capital of the separatists, and 78 percent in Mullaitivu, where thousands of civilians were said to have been killed in May 2009 when government forces moved in to defeat the rebels. The government has accused the TNA of renewing calls for a separate state through its push for devolution of power. The TNA says it wants devolution in a united Sri Lanka, not a separate state. “They must trust us,” C.V. Wigneswaran, the chief candidate for the TNA who will be the province's chief minister, told reporters. “We are for an undivided Sri Lanka, where there is a certain amount of self-ruling under the federal constitution,” he said. — Reuters
