50 percent turnout for polls in Sri Lanka’s tamil dominated region
Colombo: 50 percent of voters on Saturday exercise their vote in the first polls in 25 years in Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority Northern Province.
Voting at some 850 stations began on schedule at 7 am (local time) amid tight security to elect the provincial administration in the region dominated by the Tamil Tigers until their defeat by the military in 2009. Soldiers patrolled the streets with police, election observers said.
Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Mannar, Mullaithivu and Vavuniya districts form the provincial council’s jurisdiction. For decades, these districts were the main strongholds of the LTTE.
The run-up to the election saw allegations of voters being intimidated by the army. The charge was firmly denied by the military.
There are nearly 906 candidates for the polls in the Northern Province, which is witnessing its first election after councils were created under the 13th Amendment, a byproduct of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord.
In the first north and east provincial council elections in 1988, only one political party participated due to the LTTE’s armed campaign to set up a separate Tamil homeland.
“My family and I want to maintain the peace here,” an elderly man said after voting in Jaffna. He said he was supporting President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Tamil ally, Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP), which is a part of the ruling coalition.
However a majority was expected to favour the main Tamil party, Tamil National Alliance (TNA). “Tamils have a lot of problems which are yet to be resolved,” said a trader who did not want to vote.
The TNA maintained that Tamils were keen to vote but were prevented from doing so by the military, which had intimidated them. It also complained that fake propaganda material, which said leading TNA candidate Ananthi Saseetharan had defected to the ruling coalition, had been didtributed by government supporters.
Posters appeared in several areas warning that a vote for the TNA would be a return to the period of terror when the LTTE ran its parallel administration. It was not known who put up these posters.
