Sri Lanka Tamil party criticises presidential panel

By Ranga Sirilal | Reuters
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Sri Lanka's main Tamil party on Thursday ruled out participating in a new advisory panel set up to review government appointments by the president, dismissing it as a powerless body.

The opposition and Washington have criticised the amendment to the constitution that created the committee, which President Mahinda Rajapaksa pushed through parliament this month, for diluting the few remaining checks on the powerful presidency.

It also lifted the presidential two-term limit, freeing Rajapaksa to run for a third term in 2017.

"The parliamentary committee is a powerless body, which is not going to do anything and we do not want be a member of that council which can't do anything for the people," Tamil National Alliance (TNA) legislator Suresh Premachandran told Reuters.

The new parliamentary committee has no veto power on appointments and replaces a 10-member constitutional council set up under an amendment passed in 2001 but never enacted.

The TNA said its parliamentarian, M.A Sumanthiran, would not join the five-member panel.

Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP), who will sit on the new committee, had nominated Sumanthiran. The UNP and TNA opposed the amendment but were powerless to stop it in a parliament Rajapaksa's party controls.

The TNA is the largest party representing Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, and it had been the political proxy for the Tamil Tiger separatists whom the government defeated last year to end a civil war that had raged off and on since 1983.

The TNA has said it is willing to work with Rajapaksa toward devolution of powers, one of the main bones of contention during the war. Rajapaksa has promised to deliver some kind of political reconciliation to Tamils but has yet to do much.

Diplomats from the West and Japan, one of Sri Lanka's staunchest allies, have warned that a failure to bring meaningful reconciliation could spark new violence.

Scholars say Sri Lanka's constitutional changes or failings helped fuel the 1971 and 1988-89 uprisings by the Marxist JVP, in which more than 100,000 people were killed, and the Tamil Tigers' war, in which an equal number were killed.

© Reuters