COLOMBO, 6 April 2004 — Sri Lanka’s minority government will have a tough time resuming talks with the Tamil Tigers after voters elected an ethnically divided Parliament and rejected the outgoing prime minister’s approach to peace, analysts said yesterday.

Divisions in President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s alliance and the mixed message from voters will complicate her pledge to carry forward efforts to end a 20-year war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), they said.

“The president still wants to take the peace process forward but she’ll have less room to maneuver,” one Western diplomat told Reuters.

“Because of the composition of Parliament and the way the election has gone, it will be harder for the LTTE to trust the government to deliver,” he said.

Kumaratunga’s United People’s Freedom Alliance won 105 seats in the 225-seat Parliament, ousting Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP), which signed the February 2002 truce that has given the island its best chance for lasting peace.

Voters also gave large minorities to two parties from opposite ends of the island’s ethnic divide, with a rebel-backed party winning 22 seats and a new, all-clergy party of Buddhist monks winning nine seats.

Analysts said the UNP’s defeat was partly due to unpopular economic policies, especially in rural areas where people felt little of a promised peace dividend and were hurt by cuts in subsidies, but was also a reaction to its approach to peace.

“There was a sense the prime minister was giving too much to the LTTE,” said Jehan Perera of the independent National Peace Council. “Almost without exception, Sinhalese society saw it that way — even those who supported the peace process.”

“He (Wickremesinghe) was seen as too soft on an LTTE that was seen as aggressive, unrepentant and unreformed,” he said of the separatist group that has been fighting for a Tamil homeland in the island’s north and east.

The Freedom Alliance is almost certain to take a tougher line on the Tigers. Kumaratunga, left blind in one eye from a Tiger assassination attempt is a bitter foe of the rebels, and her coalition includes the hard-line People’s Liberation Front.

The Sinhalese nationalist party in past led two Marxist rebellions and although it has since tempered its rhetoric and says talks are the only way to end the war, it objects to any devolution of power to the rebels.

“The Alliance itself has to arrive at a consensus with regard to what its position will be. My sense is they’ll be pragmatic about it,” said Perera.

Regardless of the election outcome, the peace process had already been muddled by an unprecedented split in the Tigers in March, when a powerful eastern commander broke away from the group’s northern leaders, shattering its internal discipline.

Ironically, that may help the cease-fire hold through what could be a long process of getting talks back on track, with the Tigers weakened by the split they have yet to internally resolve.

“Peace becomes more complicated and more prolonged,” said Kingsley de Silva, executive director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies.

Analysts say the last two years of peace after the war that killed 64,000 show the strength of the ceasefire.

The best hope now, they say, is that it holds through what could be another turbulent period.