Adithya Alles

SRI Lankans witnessed one of the country’s most contentious elections ever when President Mahinda Rajapaksa staved off the challenge posed by his former Army commander, Sarath Fonseka, and clinched more than 1.8 million majority votes during the Jan. 26 poll.

Both presidential contenders gained popularity after the Sri Lankan military successfully wiped out the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) last May, ending a civil war that spanned more than two decades and cost over 70,000 lives.

Rajapaksa’s new term, set to begin this November, will be full of challenges, as the charismatic leader tries to grapple with the economy and fast-track development. He has promised to develop the war-ravaged north and open a dialogue with minority Tamil political parties, promising to seek a political solution to their long-running grievances.

Since his re-election, Rajapaksa has maintained a reconciliatory tone despite the overwhelming majority of the Tamil votes going to his rival Fonseka. "I am the president of those who voted for me and those who did not," he said at the Election Commissioner’s Department a day after the election, or within minutes of the announcement of the highly anticipated results.

The road head, however, will not be easy. Rajapaksa will have to make some tough decision that will not please his nationalist Sinhala voter base if he is to come up with a viable solution to the Tamil problem, a leading academic told IPS.

"He will have to bring in the Tamil minority into a position of political power. To do that he will have to take decisions that could be interpreted as concessions," Terrence Purasinghe, a lecturer at the Sri Jayawardenapura University, told IPS.

Purasinghe believes that Rajapaksa has the best chance to pursue such bold moves. "He is in his second term," he said, adding that the Constitution forbids him from seeking another term. Being "very popular," he is in the best position to make such decisions and not worry too much about the political fallout."

Other observers feel that the newly re-elected president’s decisive victory also strengthens his hand even more. "Rajapaksa’s decisive re-election as president of Sri Lanka gives him an opportunity to move the country forward on multiple fronts: political reform, economic renewal, and reengagement with international players," the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies said in a paper on the Sri Lankan election written by Uttara Dukkipati, research assistant with the Center’s South Asia Program.

Rajapaksa has indicated that he is not shifting attention from the minority issues. "It is necessary that we give equal priority to the tasks of national reconciliation and the building of trust among all sections of our people, as well as to development that will take us to our rightful place in the community of nations," he said in his message on the commemoration of the country’s 62nd independence on Feb. 4, his first to the nation since his re- election.

Tamil political parties who backed Rajapaksa during the election think he is their best bet. "If he was not elected, all the development plans, some already implemented, would have been disrupted. He understands the issues facing the Tamils and he will deal with them," said Vinayagamurthi Muralitharan alias Karuna, a former Tiger eastern military commander who broke ranks with the LTTE command in 2004. He is now the Minister of National Integration in the Rajapaksa administration.

Rajapaksa, however, could not gain the support of the largest Tamil party represented in parliament, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). The alliance did hold several discussions with the president before the election and before coming forth with a decision to support Fonseka instead.

"The current government has not shown any interest in solving the issues of the Tamils. The President did not give satisfactory responses (during the discussions)," TNA member of parliament Mavi Senathiraja said. Post-election the TNA indicated that it was willing to reopen talks with the President.

Rajapaksa also said that he was willing to consider giving more political powers to the Tamil minority. "I am certain that the people in the north and east could stand on their own feet through a solution wrought by devolving powers to the villages and empowering them in the entire country," he said in his speech on Independence Day.

But only time will tell how far he is willing to go in devolving power from the centre.

For the tens of thousands of Tamil minorities who fled the fighting between government troops and the LTTE, the more pressing need is getting back to normal life than being granted more political power.

As the fighting wound down in May 2009, over 280,000 civilians fled areas in northern Sri Lanka known as the Vanni, which were held by the Tigers. Of these, more than 150,000 have returned to their home villages while a little above 105,000 still remain at welfare camps.

For those who have returned to their homes like Angela Croos from the village of Arippu in southern Vanni, the immediate need is development. "What we need is permanent peace. We do have peace in the country, but we are still struggling to get back on our feet once again," she told IPS.

"We have problems when it comes to basic facilities such as toilets, transport and medicine. The nearest hospital is around six miles away. We have to cross a river. The road is not in good condition. We hope that these problems will be addressed now that the election is over."

Rajapaksa allayed these concerns when he declared national development and the economy were also high on his agenda.

"Our country, which fell back in progress because of the war, needs to be advanced swiftly. Peace alone is not enough," Rajapaksa declared in his Independence Day address. "One country, one people, one law. That is our way, the only way."

Said Croos: "We can only believe and hope that things will be better now; we have been through hell." [Courtesy IPS]

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Europe pushes to prise open India

David Cronin

SECRET discussions aimed at pressuring India into dropping all measures that shield its industry from foreign competition have been held between European Union officials and some of the world's top corporations.

BusinessEurope, a group representing large companies, has been intimately involved in all stages of the EU's preparations for talks aimed at securing a free trade agreement with India. Internal documents from the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, show that it requested advice from the group when setting priorities for the talks as early as February 2007 - nine months before the talks were formally launched.

In response, BusinessEurope advocated that the key objective for these talks should be the complete abolition of trade taxes imposed by India; such tariffs are used by India to prevent its domestic firms from being undercut by cheaper imports of the goods they manufacture. "Anything less than this (abolition) would allow the exemption of highly protected sectors (from the agreement's scope) and dramatically reduce the potential benefits to the European economy," the group said.

The documents, seen by IPS, suggest that all of the core recommendations made by BusinessEurope were accepted by the Commission. Peter Mandelson, then the European commissioner for trade, said that the issues on which the group had advised him "coincide with my own priority concerns" in a letter he wrote to BusinessEurope in March 2008.

Anti-poverty campaigners are angry that BusinessEurope has been tasked with helping the EU draw up an aggressive plan to prise open India for foreign investors. The plan does not take account of the vast gap in wealth between Europe and India, which has the highest number of poor people in the world, the campaigners say. Some 42 percent of India's billion-plus population lived on less than 1.25 dollars per day in 2005, according to the most recently available data from the World Bank.

"The Commission is a service provider for big business in these negotiations," said Peter Fuchs from the German organisation World Economy, Ecology and Development (WEED). By contrast, organisations working on social justice or environmental issues are "kept at a distance" by the EU's trade negotiators, he added.

A study on the EU-India talks published last year by the Centre for Trade and Development (CENTAD), which researches economic issues affecting south Asia, stated that there is a profound asymmetry between the EU and India. Although India's total gross domestic product was only 6.5 percent that enjoyed by the EU in 2008, the Union has viewed India as an economic equal in the negotiations, the paper says.

It also found that the EU's drive to remove almost all tariffs that India applies to food imports could leave its predominantly small farmers vulnerable to price changes and unable to compete with foreign produce. Some five million farmers who grow just one crop would be at risk. And the CENTAD paper warned that the EU's demands that the services sector in India be more accommodating to foreign investors could endanger the future of 12 million small retail outlets once they are pitted against international chain-stores.

An Indian diplomat said there is an understanding between the EU and his government that tariffs should be removed from 90 percent of all goods traded by both sides. India has compiled a list of goods it deems "sensitive" and wants to have excluded from the scope of the agreement, at least temporarily. But the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added that this list is "not cast in stone".

After India first sought to have 643 goods exempted from the provisions of an eventual free trade agreement for a period of seven years, the European Commission sent the list of these goods to Business Europe in February 2008. Philippe de Buck, BusinessEurope's president at the time, replied the following month, arguing that the Indian list was "far too extensive" as it included products considered to be of critical importance to the exporters he represents.

John Clancy, a European Commission spokesman, denied that BusinessEurope has been given "privileged treatment" over other organisations interested in trade policy. The Commission seeks advice from public interest groups, as well as the private sector, on how its trade negotiations should be handled, he said.

Yet while the Commission organises seminars on its trade policies several times a year, the nature of its dialogue with public interest advocates is of a "very different nature" to that with large firms, according to Olivier Hoedeman from Corporate Europe Observatory, which monitors the activities of lobbyists in Brussels.

Hoedeman said that whereas the Commission's trade department has close contacts with private sector representatives when formulating strategies, it only invites comments from campaigners on social and ecological issues once those strategies have been drawn up. [Courtesy IPS]

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