Chandrika partially blinded by attack

The attempt on her life just three days before the December 21 presidential election caused widespread speculation about the exact nature of Kumaratunga’s injuries. Kumaratunga’s aides had then asserted that the shrapnel injuries to her eye had not impaired her vision.

State-run radio said today that she had resumed her presidential duties on her return from London, where she went for medical treatment and consultations immediately after being sworn in following her re-election on December 22. But it made no mention of the damage to her eyesight.

As if to underline that she was completely fit, a communique from the government’s information department said Kumaratunga had ordered an inquiry into the alleged gang-rape and murder by “persons in uniform” of a young woman in Jaffna peninsula recently.

Kumaratunga was seen for the first time after the attack without the bandage-patch over her injured eye on the television interview but it was still closed over by the eyelid.

She told her interviewer that she was not “hysterical” about the loss of sight in one eye, and once again spoke of her survival as a divine mandate: “I feel that there is something special that somebody somewhere wants me to do.”

Despite the assassination attempt, Kumaratunga said she was prepared to negotiate everything short of a separate state with the Tigers if Velupillai Prabhakaran dropped his “devilish” ways.

But she also said that Prabhkaran had an “obsessive fear of peace”. Kumaratunga disclosed that since 1997, both the Commonwealth secretary-general and the Norwegian government had tried to facilitate the resumption of dialogue between her government and the LTTE but the Tigers had not responded positively.

“All I can say is that the LTTE does not want a political settlement. They want to kill me before a political settlement comes in,” she said and appealed once again to expatriate Tamils to stop funding the separatist war.

“I believe the Tamil people have to look truth in the face. They have to stop supporting the terror and destruction of their own people. They have to tell Mr Prabhakaran stop and come to the negotiating table’,” she said.

Kumaratunga said she had asked her opponent Ranil Wickremesinghe to “join hands” with her and prove that he could “sit around a table and work in a mature way with an honest, sincere, committed government like mine to solve the Tamil problem together.”