Sri Lankan who led fight against Tamils seeks Presidency

By LYDIA POLGREEN - The former chief of Sri Lanka’s army formally announced Sunday that he would seek to replace his onetime ally, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, in elections to be held in January.

Gen. Sarath Fonseka retired from the army in mid-November after months of tension with Mr. Rajapaksa, who has staked his re-election campaign on the resounding military victory over the Tamil Tiger insurgency in May.

General Fonseka led a tough counterinsurgency strategy that took small teams of fighters deep into the jungles of northern Sri Lanka, striking a mortal blow to a rebel army that had battled the government for more than two decades.

“We have done away with the terrorists,” General Fonseka told reporters at a news conference on Sunday. “But now you can’t leave the country in the hands of a tin-pot dictator.”

After the war was won, Mr. Rajapaksa moved General Fonseka into a largely ceremonial post, and the uneasy alliance between the two men crumbled. A coalition of nationalist and left-wing opposition parties named General Fonseka as its candidate to face Mr. Rajapaksa.

The general has been withering in his criticism of the president since stepping down, accusing him of eroding Sri Lanka’s democracy.

But critics of the general say he oversaw a military strategy that killed thousands of civilians. According to the United Nations, at least 7,000 people died in the final bloody battle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, who were fighting for a separate state for the ethnic-Tamil minority in northern Sri Lanka.

Western countries and human rights organizations have accused the government and the Tamil Tigers of war crimes and have demanded an independent international investigation, but Sri Lanka has rebuffed the demands.

When the fighting ended, 300,000 Tamils who had been displaced by the fighting were herded into closed camps, where they were detained in poor conditions for months.

In his resignation letter, General Fonseka criticized what he described as “appalling conditions” at the camps. He promised to shift to Parliament much of the power that comes with the office of the president. He also accused Mr. Rajapaksa of failing to bring Sri Lanka together after the long and bloody war with the Tamil Tigers.

Still, many of Sri Lanka’s Tamils and other minorities remain skeptical of General Fonseka because of his role in prosecuting the war and his strong alliance with the nationalists from the ethnic-Sinhalese majority.

© The New York Times