Sri Lankans vote in post-war polls
G1NBC: Al Jazeera
Polls have opened in Sri Lanka’s first presidential elections since last year’s defeat of Tamil Tiger separatists ended a quarter-century of war.
Tuesday’s vote pits Mahinda Rajapaksa, the incumbent, against General Sarath Fonseka, his former army chief, in a tense contest already hit by bomb blasts in the northern, majority Tamil city of Jaffna early in the morning.
In the suburbs of the capital Colombo, people lined up half an hour before the polls opened across the country at 7am (01:30 GMT), according to witnesses.
Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Colombo, said many were eager to get to the polls and turnout was expected to be high as the election had “captured the imagination of the country”.
Polling stations are set to close at 4pm and first results are expected to trickle out late on Tuesday before a final outcome set to be declared around midday on Wednesday.
Tamils in focus
There have been no reliable polls, but both candidates have tried to cash in politically on their popularity among the Sinhalese majority for crushing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which had led a 25-year war for a separate Tamil state.
But it is the Tamil minority – those who suffered most from the government offensive against the separatists and who make up more than 12 per cent of the population – who may prove to be kingmakers.
Rajapaksa has campaigned on his war record and his promises to bring development to the nation.
“We defeated terrorism and separatism,” Rajapaska said in an email to supporters on Monday.
“We are now ready to lead our children and our nation to a brighter future.”
Fonseka, who also pledges an economic renaissance, accused Rajapaksa of entrenched corruption and has promised to trim the powers of the presidency and empower parliament if elected.
Neither man has outlined a detailed plan for resolving the grievances of the marginalised Tamil minority that sparked the conflict in the first place.
Benjamin Schonthal, a scholar on Sri Lanka at the US Institute of Peace, told Al Jazeera that the “election is somewhat of an irony”.
“You have two candidates who were not particularly associated with minority rights contesting an election which could be decided by minority voters,” he said.
“There’s been a lot of talk of post-war unity and national reconciliation and promises about assistance to the poor, but at this stage it is unclear what a vote for either candidate would mean.”
Twenty other candidates are also running in Tuesday’s election, but none are expected to attract a major share of the vote.