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Local polls soon in Sri Lanka’s east

B. Muralidhar Reddy

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka intends to soon hold elections to the local bodies in the troubled eastern province, said an official of the Presidential Secretariat here on Wednesday.

The official told The Hindu that with the virtual ouster of the Tamil Tigers from its remaining pockets in the east, the Government would like to empower the people at the grassroots level to elect their own representatives and have a say on issues of development.

“The time-frame is not worked out yet. The intention of the Government is to involve people in decision-making process. The idea is to follow up the local bodies polls with an election to the eastern provincial council with a Chief Minister in place,”, he said. The military says it has gained control of 99 per cent of the territory in the Thoppigala jungles, the last remaining pocket of the LTTE. A military spokesman told a news conference here that an estimated 100 odd cadres of the Tigers were trapped in the bushy jungles.

It would be for the first time since 1989 that the province would witness the democratic exercise. Elections to the temporarily merged north and eastern provinces were held as a follow up to the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. There is no immediate reaction from the southern and the Tamil parties to the move.

Meanwhile, at Oslo the Sri Lanka Co-Chairs, who met on Tuesday, chose not to issue any statement. The view was that since neither the Government nor the Tigers were in a mood to heed to any counsel on dialogue and peace, it would be a futile exercise to issue any statement. Instead, it appears individual member countries would decide on appropriate strategies to de-escalate the situation.

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