EPDP refuses to hand over RRAN vehicles

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 22 April 2003, 19:19 GMT]
The local government ministry of the North-East provincial council and the Rehabilitation and Resettlement Authority for the North (RRAN) are in a dilemma to find ways to recover the pickup vehicles supplied to ten local bodies in the Jaffna district when the paramilitary group Eelam People's Democratic Party administered them, government sources said.

In the 1988 local government elections in the Jaffna peninsula , the EPDP captured ten local bodies, the People Liberation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) two and the Tamil United Liberated Front (TULF) one. The RRAN supplied pick up vehicles to all the elected heads of these local bodies for their official use, sources said.

Last year, all these thirteen local bodies were dissolved at the end of their life term and have been brought under the administration of the special commissioners appointed by the North-East provincial local government ministry. The former chairmen of the local bodies headed by the TULF and PLOTE have handed over their official pickup vehicles to the authorities concerned, sources said.

Until now, the former chairmen of the EPDP controlled ten local councils have not returned their pick-up vehicles to the government authorities concerned even after repeated requests by the Government Agent and the Assistant Commissioner of Local Government, sources said.

The EPDP once told the ACLG, Jaffna region, that the vehicles were supplied to them by the RRAN and they would return the vehicles on the request of RRAN. Thereafter, RRAN authorities wrote to the Jaffna Government Agent to take back all the ten vehicles from ten EPDP ex-chairmen. But the Jaffna GA has not been successful in retrieving the vehicles from the EPDP, sources said.

The Rehabilitation, Reconstruction and Resettlement Minister, Dr.Jayalath Jayawardene, summoned a conference in this regard at the Jaffna district secretariat Monday but EPDP representatives did not turn up, sources said.