Six political parties representing Sri Lanka's Tamil and Muslim minority groups have formed a new alliance. The coalition wants the government to rewrite the constitution to give their regions more self-rule, restarting a major political debate nearly 20 years after the country's civil war ended.
Together, these minority communities make up more than 25% of Sri Lanka's 22 million people.
The move puts new pressure on President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and his leftist government. Minority leaders are calling on the president to keep his campaign promises to share state power more evenly across the country's different provinces.
Sri Lanka's devastating civil war lasted for nearly 30 years and cost more than 100,000 lives. It finally ended in May 2009 when government forces defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels, who had spent decades fighting for a completely separate, independent state in the north and east of the island.
Since the war ended, moderate Tamil political parties have dropped their demands to split the country. Instead, they are pushing for peaceful, regional self-governance. However, successive governments led by the country's Sinhalese majority have repeatedly failed to fully hand over the promised powers.
Alliance spokesman M.A. Sumanthiran told reporters in the capital city of Colombo that the groups are simply asking the president to deliver on policies that he already promised in his own election manifesto.
The new alliance has outlined several urgent goals. First, they want the government to immediately host provincial council elections, which have been delayed for over a decade. These local councils were originally created under a 1987 peace plan to give Tamil-majority areas limited self-rule, but major parts of that law were never actually put to use. The parties are also asking the military to return privately owned land that security forces are still holding in former war zones.
Opposition Tamil lawmaker Mano Ganesan stated that the alliance is fully committed to Sri Lanka's national unity. He stressed that they are strongly against dividing the country along ethnic lines. Instead, he argued that sharing power fairly is the only way to make the nation truly welcoming for all its citizens.
