Northeast Province (Sri Lanka)

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Territory of the Northeast Province

The Northeast Province ( Tamil வடக்கு கிழக்கு மாகாண சபை , English North Eastern Province ) is a former, existing from 1988 to 2006 Province of Sri Lanka . It was created after two proclamations by the Sri Lankan President Junius Richard Jayewardene on September 2 and 8, 1988, respectively, which ordered the unification of the Northern Province with the Eastern Province . With effect from January 1, 2007, the association was dissolved after the Sri Lankan Supreme Court ruled that the association was unconstitutional.

Formation of the Northeast Province

In 1983 the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority, which had simmered since independence, had turned into an open civil war . On one side there were the Tamil rebel organizations and on the other the Sinhala-dominated government and military apparatus . The Tamils ​​strove to form an independent state in the predominantly Tamil areas in the north and east of the island. The main victims of the conflict were the civilian population (mainly the Tamils, but also the Sinhalese), who were instrumentalized and terrorized by both sides. Neither of the two conflicting parties could achieve a decisive victory and finally India intervened as a mediator in the conflict. On July 29, 1987, the Sri Lankan President JR Jayewardene and the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi signed the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement 1987 in Colombo , which provided for various measures to end the civil war. In the agreement it was explicitly stated that Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic society and that the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka have been Tamil settlement areas for historically long times (§ 1 of the agreement). The agreement stipulated that the current state of emergency in the northern and eastern provinces should be lifted on August 15, 1987 (Section 2.9). Elections to the newly established provincial councils (local parliaments of the provinces) should be held by December 31, 1987 (§ 2.8). The predominantly Tamil-speaking northern and eastern provinces were to be administratively united to form a north- eastern province . However, a referendum was to take place in the Eastern Province by December 31, 1987, in which the residents should decide whether they agreed to the unification or would rather continue to form their own province (§ 2.2, 2.3). The Sri Lankan President was granted the right to postpone the time of the referendum if he felt it necessary (§ 2.3). All paramilitary forces were to be withdrawn from the northern and eastern provinces and the elections to the provincial councils there were to be monitored jointly by Indian and Sri Lankan representatives.

On November 14, 1987, the Sri Lankan Parliament passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which provided for the establishment of Provincial Councils. Gradually elections were held for the provincial councils of the various provinces. On September 2 and 8, 1988, President Jayewardene announced the formation of the Northeast Province in two proclamations, without prior elections to the Provincial Councils of the North and East Provinces.

The formation of the Northeast Province, which covered a quarter of the area of ​​Sri Lanka, was largely welcomed by the Tamils. They saw the Tamil-dominated province as an opportunity to represent their interests in a more concentrated manner. Nationalist Tamils ​​also demanded the connection of further areas of the Northwest Province and saw in the new province the nucleus for a future independent Tamil state. Accordingly, the formation of the new province was heavily criticized by nationalist Sinhalese, for example the Marxist-nationalist JVP , who saw it as the beginning of the end of the unity of Sri Lanka.

Elections and suspension of the regional government

Election results for the Provincial Council of the Northeast Province on November 19, 1988
Political party Seats
east North Northeast overall
EPRLF 17th 24 41
SLMC 17th 0 17th
UNP 1 0 1
ENDLF 0 12 12
total 35 36 71

On November 19, 1988, the first (and at the same time only) elections for the provincial council of the new province took place. The election date was also determined by internal Indian political considerations, since elections were also pending in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu , whose population took a lively part in the events in Sri Lanka (the 1989 elections there were won by the DMK , which sympathized with the Tamil rebels) .

The winner of the election for the Provincial Council was the militant Tamil separatist Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), which received more than 50% of the votes and mandates, the second strongest party was the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC), which in the Eastern Province received almost half who won mandates (17 of 35). After the election, however, voices were raised that the election was not free and fair, especially in the former northern province, as it was influenced by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF ) stationed there . EPRLF leader Annamalai Varatharajah Perumal was elected Chief Minister of the Northeast Province on December 10, 1988.

After the Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa had campaigned for the withdrawal of the IPKF in June 1989, the Provincial Council of the Northeast Province passed a resolution in mid-June 1989 with the votes of EPRLF and SLMC, in which Premadasa's demands were condemned.

Rajiv Gandhi and his congress party lost the Indian parliamentary elections in 1989 and the newly elected government under VP Singh made every effort to withdraw the Indian troops from Sri Lanka as quickly as possible in order to end the costly and loss-making engagement for India. Shortly before the withdrawal of the Indian troops, Perumal had a resolution of the Provincial Council of the Northeast Province passed on March 1, 1990 with a majority of his party, in which the same declared itself to be the "Free and Independent Democratic Republic of Eelam". The Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa then dissolved the Provincial Council and placed the Northeast Province under the direct administration of the central government.

Dissolution of the province

In the following years, the north-eastern province remained under the control of the central government, which, in view of the civil war, did not consider holding regular elections to the provincial council to be possible or sensible. The referendum in the former Eastern Province, as provided for in the India-Sri Lankan agreement of 1987, did not take place either. The JVP finally filed a lawsuit with the Supreme Constitutional Court with the aim of dissolving the Northeast Province as unconstitutional. On May 1, 2006, the Constitutional Court ruled that President Jayewardene's instructions to unify the Northern and Eastern Provinces were unconstitutional. The reasoning for the judgment stated that the previously set conditions, in particular the disarming of the rebels, had not been met. In addition, there had previously been no election to the Provincial Council of the Eastern Province, although the legal bases for this were in force and this had also happened in other provinces.

As a result of the ruling, the northeast province, which was never fully functional, was again divided into the original two provinces of North and East at the end of 2006. Elections to the Provincial Council then took place for the first time in the Eastern Province on May 10, 2008 and in the Northern Province on September 21, 2013.

On October 7, 2018, the Sri Lankan Tamil politician ( TNA ) and then opposition leader in parliament, R. Sampanthan, spoke out in favor of a re-establishment of the Northeast Province.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Amendments upto the Seventeenth Amendment. Retrieved January 31, 2015 .
  2. ^ A b North-East merger illegal: SC. LankaNewspapers.com, October 17, 2006, accessed July 19, 2015 .
  3. ↑ KT Rajasingham: SRI LANKA: THE UNTOLD STORY, Chapter 36: Indians rule the roost. Asia Times online, April 20, 2001, accessed July 19, 2015 .
  4. ^ A b K. M. De Silva: Regional Powers and Small State Security: India and Sri Lanka, 1977-1990. Johns Hopkins University Press (July 1995), ISBN 0801851491 , pp. 295f. Google digitization
  5. ↑ Shelton U. Kodikara: The Continuing Crisis in Sri Lanka: The JVP, the Indian Troops, Tamil and Politics . In: Asian Survey . tape 29 , no. 7 . University of California Press, July 1989, pp. 716-724 , JSTOR : 2644676 (English).
  6. ↑ Shamindra Ferdinando: The IPKF is off: War on terror revisited. Sunday Island, February 10, 2013, accessed July 19, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Shamindra Ferdinando: FEATURE: I'm no traitor, says Perumal. Sunday Island, September 10, 2000; archived from the original on May 1, 2009 ; accessed on July 19, 2015 .
  8. ^ Merger of north, east provinces needed: Sri Lanka opposition leader Sampanthan. The New Indian Express, October 5, 2017, accessed July 25, 2020 .