Sri Lanka in 1995: A Difficult and Disappointing Year

Abstract

Another difficult year has ended in Sri Lanka's troubled history, a disappointing one for those who had guardedly hoped that President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's new People's Alliance (PA) government would be able to make substantial progress toward bringing about a peaceful resolution of the country's chronic ethnic conflict. The stage for the dramatic events of 1995 was set in the last half of 1994 when Kumaratunga led the Alliance to a narrow victory in the August parliamentary election and three months later greatly strengthened her position by winning the presidential race by an unprecedented margin. In between the two contests, she had as prime minister taken major steps to break the long stalemate on the ethnic issue, relaxing the embargo on the shipment of essential goods to areas in the North controlled by the insurgent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and sending a delegation to Jaffna to hold exploratory talks with senior Tiger leaders. These initiatives had strengthened her claim in the presidential election to be the candidate of peace and ethnic harmony, and helped win her strong support from war-weary Sinhalese as well as from Sri Lankan Tamil voters.