According to President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the reason she took over the key ministries of defence, interior and media on 3 November was the deterioration of the security situation in the country. The visible advantages accruing to the LTTE due to their ability to move about freely and enter government-controlled territory in unlimited numbers was one of the most criticised aspects of the ceasefire agreement. However, after taking control of that part of the government most concerned with security issues, President Kumaratunga appears to be conducting affairs in much the same way as Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was doing when his ministers were in charge of those ministries.
The president has made repeated public statements that she would honour the entirety of the ceasefire agreement. She also ordered the armed forces to abide by the rulings of the international monitors of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) and respect their status as the arbiters of the ceasefire agreement. This was quite a turnaround from her past conduct, when she had been a strident critic of the SLMM, even to the extent of publicly demanding that the Norwegian government should remove its present head for being biased. While the president has not rescinded her demand that the head be removed, she has legitimised the role of the international monitors by her orders.
Furthermore, the president has not followed one of her own controversial directives to the former defence minister, whose portfolio she took over. In October the president had ordered the latter to remove the camp put up by the LTTE in an area of Trincomalee determined to be government territory by the international monitors. But, after assuming the role of the defence minister, she has been quiet about the LITE camp, no doubt realising that any effort to forcibly remove it could severely endanger the ceasefire.
Therefore, it is clearly evident that the president, who took over the three ministries citing national security concerns, has not changed anything fundamental compared to what her predecessor as defence minister was doing. In the last week of November she even instructed the media ministry that she took over not to criticise the LTTE. Her own words towards the LTTE have become more conciliatory and beginning to sound more like that of the government that she only recently was criticising for being too soft on the Tigers.