JAFFNA, Jan 25: Local issues have taken a back seat in the upcoming civic elections in the war-ravaged Sri Lankan peninsula as contestants vie with each other to please the Tamil Tigers in order to gain the confidence of the voters.Each of the five Tamil political parties contesting the January 29 local elections - the first in 15 years - is pitching itself as the only party that can fight for Tamil rights. At the same time, they are going out of their way to gratify the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), never missing an opportunity to emphasise that there is no conflict of interest between them and the Tigers.Leader of the Eelam Peoples' Democratic Party (EPDP) Douglas Devananda has stated that Tamil groups like the PLOTE or EPRLF could have been behind the attack on his cadres in Pungudutheevu island in which two candidates were killed, even though it is widely believed to be an LTTE operation.Unable to gauge the real extent of support and sympathy for the Tigers in Jaffna, the contesting Tamil parties have found it safer, both for their own security and for the purposes of gaining voter-confidence, to toe the LTTE line on the ongoing ethnic conflict.While the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) has declared that every vote for its candidate would be a vote against the Government's devolution package which the LTTE has rejected, Sri Lanka's moderate Tamil party, the Tamil United National Front (TULF), in its campaign, has demanded an immediate end to the war between the government and the LTTE.And even though the TULF's main candidate, Sarojini Yogeswaran, who hopes to be elected as Mayor of Jaffna, is the widow of a politician assassinated by the LTTE, she is not using this to gain the sympathy of voters. ``We are not making that an issue now,'' said TULF vice-president V Anandasangari, who is camping here for the elections.With the exception of the TELO and the EPRLF, which are not represented in Parliament, the other contestants are ardent supporters of Chandrika Kumaratunga's Government and give it crucial support. But in their election campaigns, they have been stridently criticising her political package as insufficient.Several Government officials and some candidates have received anonymous letters threatening dire consequences if they participate in the elections, and these have been attributed to the LTTE.
