A glimmer of hope has broken through the gloom that clouded hope for a political resolution of Sri Lanka´s bloody ethnic crisis, which has cost an estimated 50,000 lives on both sides of the line in the last 17 years. On 19 January, Ranil Wickremesinghe, the leader of the opposition United National Party (UNP) who challenged Chandrika Kumaratunga for the presidency on 21 December, indicated his willingness to support the government´s constitutional amendments, which the president has consistently maintained was the key to a political solution to what is often called the "Tamil problem". (Cause for hope is also springing from as far away as Scandinavia, as Norway has expressed its desire to play an intermediary role in talks between the government and the LTTE.)
Wickremesinghe, however, is not as optimistic as the president that the constitutional changes she proposes is the way forward to peace. Pledging his party´s parliamentary support for her proposals, the UNP leader expressed his reservations on the likelihood of the constitutional changes laying the groundwork for peace. "Our stand is that this problem cannot be successfully solved by the process you intend to resolve the issue. But since you don´t have any other solution, we would not block the process".
There is more than a strong dose of realpolitik in the seemingly conciliatory gesture that had come at a time when relations between Kumaratunga´s ruling People´s Alliance (PA) and the UNP had sunk to a new low. The UNP accuses the government of widespread malpractice in the presidential election where the incumbent, who had narrowly escaped death at the hands of a suicide bomber of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), comfortably won with a 51 percent plurality against Wickremesinghe´s 42.
The main opposition party has even filed a petition against Kumaratunga´s election. The case itself is likely to drag on for a long time. (When Sirima Bandaranaike challenged President Ranasinghe Premadasa´s 1988 election, it took the Supreme Court three years for a determination.) Also, most experts believe that the judges will assess whether established malpractice (assuming the petitioners are able to prove at least some of the charges in their plaint) were sufficient to have altered the result. Even newspapers that opposed Kumaratunga have conceded that the 700,000 plus votes she had over Wickremesinghe would have ensured her victory even on a level field. The gap between the winner and the loser was unexpectedly wide, explained by analysts as partly due to a sympathy wave that benefitted the president following the assassination attempt.