Battle for Sri Lanka

TIMEasia.com: News -- The island nation goes to the polls on Nov. 17 to select a new president—an election that could prove to be a choice between war and peace BY Alex Perry : "There are not many elections where candidates campaign behind razor wire, surrounded by 14 bodyguards and watched over by helicopter gunships. But then there are not many elections that could make the difference between war and peace. To press his case in this week's vote for Sri Lanka's presidency, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe has flown a plane of reporters north to an army base at Palaly, a peninsula of shrimp ponds and sandy jungle which is both a spiritual home to the island's Tamil minority and a key battleground for its Tamil guerrillas. While Wickremesinghe chats amiably to the soldiers, there is no question of him leaving the base and meeting Tamils. "I just don't think it's possible," he says, gesturing over a machine-gun nest at the no man's land of empty, bullet-riddled farmhouses that separates him from Jaffna, the nearby Tamil capital.

After half a century of hostility between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, two decades of civil war, and three years of a steadily collapsing ceasefire, Sri Lanka could use someone prepared to take a few bold steps. So it's depressing to learn that Wickremesinghe—widely considered the candidate most capable of delivering peace—expects to be cut down if he ventures into the unknown.

Given the choice between the reformist Wickremesinghe and the nationalist Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse to replace outgoing President Chandrika Kumaratunga, a leader of conviction seems guaranteed. But with each candidate proposing strikingly different paths for the nation, and surveys indicating an election too close to call, uncertainty clouds Sri Lanka in the run-up to the Nov. 17 vote. Wickremesinghe positions himself as the candidate for peace. The 56-year-old head of the United National Party negotiated the 2002 ceasefire when he was prime minister from 2001 to 2004, and his campaign centers on a pledge to reach a settlement in two years. Rajapakse, 59, of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom party, denies he is the candidate for war. But the tag has stuck since he has allied himself with an alliance of xenophobe Marxists and hardline Buddhist monks, and—to the alarm of even Kumaratunga—has proposed ripping up the ceasefire agreement.

Sri Lanka must make its choice at a time of mounting crisis. Peace talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were abandoned in 2003 after six rounds made no headway. Since then, this tear-shaped Indian Ocean island of red-roof bungalows, coconut palms and white beaches, where Tamils make up 18% of a population of 20 million, has slid inexorably back to war. The Tigers are blamed for assassinating a series of politicians and army officers, including Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, shot by a sniper in August as he took a night swim at his mansion in the capital Colombo. And a shadow war of skirmishes and ambushes rages in the east between the rebels and a breakaway group, led by an ex-Tiger commander believed to enjoy the support of the Sri Lankan army.

The violence is escalating, from 15 killings in 2002 to 59 in 2003, 108 in 2004, and 195 to October this year, according to the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management. Last December's tsunami brought more death, adding 37,000 lives to the 64,000 already claimed by war. A faltering economy only adds to Sri Lanka's woes. The International Monetary Fund says inflation will hit 14% this year, hoteliers will take years to recover from the tsunami, and a once-thriving garment industry is struggling after a system of world textile quotas ended in January. A European diplomat in Colombo says that given the jam in which Sri Lanka finds itself, the election offers at best "a honeymoon with Ranil" or "continuing deterioration with Mahinda." Sri Lanka, says Professor Dayan Jayatilleka, Visiting Scholar in South Asia Studies at John Hopkins University, "is at a crossroads."

Wickremesinghe's supporters say his peace plan is not the only reason to support him. During his term in office, Wickremesinghe cut inflation from 14% to less than 4%, eased restrictions on private and foreign investment, and negotiated $4.5 billion in foreign aid, contingent on Sri Lanka achieving a permanent peace. "I stand for a better life for this country," Wickremesinghe tells TIME, "which means peace and development."

If Wickremesinghe appeals to the head, Rajapakse tugs at the heart. His record in office is as poor as it is brief. After he replaced Wickremesinghe, inflation rocketed and restrictions on foreign investment were reinstated. Then he and Kumaratunga made such a hash of tsunami relief that the auditor-general found the government had spent just 13.5% of $1.2 billion in donations by last month, and what they had managed to disperse was subject to "widespread misappropriation." (All but a few thousand of Sri Lanka's 443,000 tsunami homeless still wait to be re-housed.) But both campaigns admit that the affable, earthy Rajapakse is simply more likable. Even a friend describes Wickremesinghe as "a cold fish, too-clever-by-half, and aloof."

Also, with conflict in the east and assassinations in Colombo, Sri Lankans believe they are already at war. To many Sinhalese, Wickremesinghe's relentless pursuit of peace makes him a reckless appeaser, when the need of the hour is a staunch patriot like Rajapakse to stop the rot. "I will bring strength, rather than a weak leader who is giving them any and all, without even solving the problem," Rajapakse tells TIME. At a campaign stop in Bulathsinghala in the southern rural heartland, he skillfully plays on his audience's apprehensions. "There is fear everywhere," he says. "Children cannot go to school, mothers cannot go to hospital, farmers cannot work their fields. People are getting killed. What kind of peace is it when a Prime Minister can't visit parts of his own country?" As if to underline the point, Rajapakse is even more heavily guarded than Wickremesinghe, surrounded by scores of bodyguards and paratroopers, trail-bike outriders touting Uzi submachine guns, and bullet-proof cars and lecterns.

It takes two tribes, of course, to go to war. Sri Lanka's future depends as much on the Tigers' reaction to the election as its result. On Nov. 27, ten days after the vote, Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran will emerge from his underground bunker in the rebel stronghold of Killinochchi in northern Sri Lanka to deliver his verdict in his annual policy speech for Tamils and Sinhalese. Prabhakaran is a self-styled demi-god known for his unpredictability, a fondness for child soldiers and—long before the world had heard of Osama bin Laden—constructing a cult of suicidal sacrifice around a squad of martyr-bombers known as the Black Tigers. Rajapakse's rhetoric about a unitary state camouflages the reality that Prabhakaran's rebels have already carved out a separate nation, complete with heavily fortified borders, courts, civil administration, traffic police, national flags and even a national anthem, currently being written. No one in Sri Lanka has any illusions that the Tiger leader is capable of single-handedly taking the country back to war. Still, despite Prabhakaran's adjutants feigning equal disinterest in either candidate, conflict is more likely with a Rajapakse victory. A senior adviser to the Prime Minister admits that Rajapakse's stance is "very, very risky" in terms of provoking Prabhakaran. If Rajapakse wins, says a senior Tiger, "I think we're going back to war."

For their part, both candidates insist they want to bring the country together, uniting Tamil and Sinhalese and ending the bitter rivalry between their two parties that so often blocked the road to peace. Wickremesinghe says his ultimate aim is to fashion "a change of culture for Sri Lankan politics and a change of destiny for Sri Lanka." Rajapakse acknowledges a need for "a new approach, a consensus." It is Sri Lanka's burden this week to decide which of their quarrelsome leaders is best equipped to forge that harmony."