Sri Lanka elections 2013: Tamil party wins key vote in north

Tamil party has won Sri Lanka’s first elections for a semi-autonomous council in the island’s north after decades of ethnic war, official results show.

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) won 30 seats in the 38-member council following Saturday’s Northern Provincial Council elections.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s coalition won seven of the other seats.

The vote took place four years after the army defeated Tamil Tiger rebels.

The TNA will now form the first functioning provincial government in the northern Tamil heartland.

The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress won one seat.

The result is a sign that the mainly Tamil population of the north is looking for a high degree of self-government – but there will now have to be intense bargaining with the central government on what that will entail.

The Tamil-majority Northern Province, which was first promised such a body decades ago, is the only region that has never had its own council.

The run-up to the election was marred by allegations of army intimidation that were firmly denied by the authorities.

Vast swathes of the region were once strongholds of Tamil Tiger rebels, who fought against the mainly Sinhalese army for a separate homeland as Sri Lanka was plunged into a bitter and bloody civil war for 26 years.

The rebels were defeated in May 2009 but the final phase of that war remains dogged by war crimes allegations, and the government’s rights record since then has come in for trenchant criticism.

The elections have been seen by the UN and the world community as an important gauge as to the level of reconciliation between the Tamils and the majority ethnic Sinhalese, who mostly control Sri Lanka’s government and military.

The vote went to the heart of how the country should accommodate its ethnic minority who complain of being second class citizens without a say in their own affairs.