By P.K. Balachandran, IANS
Colombo : An all-party panel in Sri Lanka is set to reject the Tamil minority’s demand for a federal constitution while suggesting improvements in the present unitary system to make it more democratic.
This follows pressure from President Mahinda Rajapaksa on the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) not to go beyond the devolution granted by the 13th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution that followed the 1987 India-Sri Lanka peace accord, an informed source told IANS.
The APRC, headed by Science Minister Tissa Vitharana, is to give its recommendations Jan 23.
The president’s public posture, however, is that he has issued no such diktat. He said Saturday that he was under growing pressure from the international community to show progress in politically resolving the ethnic conflict.
“I asked them to give me something on Jan 23,” Rajapaksa said.
But political circles and APRC insiders maintain that the president wants a report strictly within the confines of the present unitary constitution, which is anathema to the Tamils.
Dominant sections in the Sinhalese political establishment, however, believe that a federal set-up will be the first step towards eventual separation.
The 13th amendment set up provincial councils in Sri Lanka and gave them a modicum of autonomy. But successive governments failed to implement even the modest provisions of the amendment in letter and spirit.
For example, there has been no provincial council in the Tamil-speaking northeastern province since 1990. And in the rest of Sri Lanka, de facto power continues to rest with the central government in Colombo.
Rajapaksa did not want the APRC to recommend a federal system or even go beyond the 13th amendment because he felt that any such major departure would not secure the required two-thirds majority in the 225-seat parliament.
“This was told to the APRC by a key minister Jan 9, and the president himself repeated it to Vitharana the next day,” an APRC member told IANS.
Rajapaksa’s argument is that the main opposition United National Party (UNP) would not support anything beyond the 13th amendment. The UNP has opted out of the APRC and was, therefore, unlikely to take its recommendations seriously.
The 38-member Sinhalese-Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) has already made it clear that it will not support anything beyond the 13th amendment.
The JVP actually walked out of the APRC saying the panel was talking of federalism and was trying to dilute the 2005 electoral mandate of the president, which it said was to continue the constitution’s unitary structure.
The largest Tamil party in parliament, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), was not even invited to be part of the APRC because of its association with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Smarting under the rejection, the TNA may vote against any recommendation made by the APRC.
The president is dependent on the JVP to keep his government afloat in a badly hung parliament. But others say that the president is himself convinced that the 13th amendment is the most practical solution.
The president’s reported diktat has put the APRC in a bind because it has already gone very far in working out a quasi-federal devolution package and was going to submit it Jan 23.
“Now it has no option but to go along with the president,” a source said.