Kumaratunga ally denounces UNF-LTTE peace talks

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 06 February 2002, 16:04 GMT]
The radical Sinhala nationalist - socialist Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a key ally of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, vowed Wednesday to fight Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesighe's government if it "dared to lift the ban on the Liberation Tigers".

Addressing a rally of more than two thousand in Nugegoda, Mr. Tilvin de Silva, General Secretary of the JVP and Mr. Wimal Weerawansa, MP, the powerful Publicity Secretary of the party, denounced the UNF government's negotiations with the LTTE as a betrayal of the country to the sinister designs of western capitalist powers.

Two bloody insurrections by the JVP in 1971 and 1989 to establish communist rule in Sri Lanka were brutally suppressed.

JVP leaders on stage with Anjaan Ummah, the party's woman MP. (Photo:TamilNet)

However, since 1994 it has emerged a powerful third force in Sinhala politics. The JVP saved the PA government from collapse last year by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with it which, among other things, put a moratorium on negotiations between Colombo and the Tigers on regional autonomy to the Tamils.

The party insists that socialism is the only panacea to the island's afflictions, including the ethnic conflict. The JVP, like its ally President Chandrika Kumaratunga, campaigned at the general elections last December against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's United National Party by propagating the allegation that the UNP was involved in an insidious conspiracy with the LTTE to destroy the Sinhala nation.

The party is opposing a peace deal between Mr. Wickremesinghe's government and the LTTE with steadily increasing belligerence as was evident in the rhetoric of Mr. Weerawanse and Mr. Tilvin Silva at the rally in Nugegoda Wednesday.

A political analyst for a Sinhala weekly said that the JVP is apprehensive that a peaceful settlement of the conflict could pave the way for the island's economic resurgence and hence deprive it of the conditions for winning converts to its socialist, Sinhala nationalist agenda.

(Photo:TamilNet)