- President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his three brothers — Defence Secretary Gotabhaya, Basil, who controls politics and economic policies, and the soft-spoken Speaker of the Parliament, Chamal — are the arbiters of their country’s destiny.
- It is clear from the policies the Rajapaksa brothers have pursued since the defeat of the LTTE in May 2009 that their principal objective has been to prevent forever the emergence of a similar organisation. Now, the surest way to ensure that objective would be to take steps to erode, if not eliminate, separatist sentiment among the Tamil community.
- And the first measure in this direction would be to implement the 13th Amendment and the recommendations of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) report, especially with regard to incidents of excessive or malicious use of force against civilians in the last few months of the anti-LTTE operations
- However, President Rajapaksa and Gotabhaya in particular, have always been critical of the 13th Amendment devolution process which created the provincial councils and gave the provinces meaningful powers including over land and the police.
13th Amendment :
- The Thirteenth Amendment (13A) to the Constitution of Sri Lanka is amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka which created Provincial Councils in Sri Lanka. This also made Sinhala and Tamil as the official language of the country and English as link language
- On 29 July 1987, Indo-Sri Lanka Accord was signed between Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayewardene which stated that devolution powers to the provinces. Hence on 14 November 1987 the Sri Lankan Parliament passed the 13th Amendment to the 1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka and the Provincial Councils Act No 42 of 1987 to establish provincial councils.
- Although Sri Lanka has given an assurance to India during Rajapaksa-Manmohan talks in July 2010 and subsequently to UN Secretary General Ban-ki-Moon that the government would go beyond the 13th amendment to devolve substantial powers to Tamil majority areas, neither India nor the UNSG asked Colombo to specify the meaning of 13 plus
- The 13th amendment was introduced to create provincial councils as a follow up action on Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of 1987 to devolve powers to the Tamil majority north and east. However, the then President J R Jayewardene’s government, decided to set up 9 provincial councils for the entire Island-Nation in order to scuttle the mounting opposition to devolution of powers to Tamil areas
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