Ex-Sri Lanka president warns of short-lived peace

Sri Lanka's former president has warned of a "short-lived peace" unless the government shares power with the ethnic Tamil minority after the end of the island's civil war, media reports said Monday. Chandrika Kumaratunga, who ruled the island between 1994 and 2005, said her successor President Mahinda Rajapakse had followed a policy of "winner takes all" after crushing Tamil rebels in 2009. "I know that if we persist in this policy of winner takes all, then we will lose all," Kumaratunga was quoted as saying in a commemorative lecture for a late supreme court judge, K. Palakidnar. The local Financial Times newspaper said she urged Rajapakse to work towards an "inclusive society" and share political power with minority Tamils and not to club the Tamil civilians together with the Tamil Tiger guerrillas. "Sharing political power (with Tamils) will not reduce our strength, rather it will bring together all the diverse talents and skills of a variety of ethnicities to enrich us," she said. The separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) battled for decades for a homeland for the ethnic Tamil minority, feeding off complaints about discrimination and marginalisation. "Today the state is clearly not adopting inclusivity but rather the opposite," Kumaratunga said. Her remarks on Sunday evening came as a political party that was closely linked with the Tamil Tigers won control of two-thirds of local councils in Sri Lanka's former war zone. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) won 18 out of 26 councils that voted on Saturday in the former conflict areas of the island's north and east, in the first local elections since the end of nearly four decades of ethnic conflict. President Rajapakse's United People's Freedom Alliance was left with just three councils in the former conflict zone, where the party had tried to improve its voter base after troops annihilated the Tigers two years ago. But the president's party succeeded in securing all 39 councils in the Sinhalese majority regions. Saturday's poll covered 65 administrative bodies. National elections were held last year, including in the former war zone, but the local polls are the first since the end of the gruelling conflict.