Eastern Sri Lanka holds election amid allegations of intimidation, voting fraud

VALAICHCHENAI, Sri Lanka (AP) - A climate of fear hung over Sri Lanka's Eastern Province elections Saturday following attacks blamed on the Tamil Tiger rebels and accusations of intimidation against a breakaway guerrilla group that backs the ruling party.

The election was also marred by claims of fraud and ballot stuffing carried out by ruling party supporters.

The government promised the balloting for a provincial assembly would herald a "new dawn" for the embattled region, which was under rebel control for 13 years and then suffered from a wide-ranging war before the military ousted the Tamil Tigers from the area last year.

It has said the elected body will also give minority communities a degree of self-rule and negate rebel demands for an independent state.

Many were skeptical that the election would change anything.

"I don't believe it. I've heard that before," an unemployed 50-year-old woman who identified herself as Kannahi said after voting in the town of Valaichchenai.

Asked for her last name, she laughed nervously. "If I tell, I might disappear in the night. That's how things happen here," she said.

Kannahi said her husband disappeared at a police checkpoint 18 years ago and she had to pull her two sons out of high school and send them into hiding so they would not be forcibly conscripted by the rebels. She cannot afford a house or the dowry needed to marry off her daughter, she added.

"We need peace. We should be able to sleep without fear our children will be taken away," Kannahi said.

Ending the chaos and violence appeared to be a major voter concern.

A man who gave only the name Viji said he was displaced by fighting last year in his town of Sampur and was not allowed back when the government declared the area a high-security zone. Though he received his voting card, he said many of the tens of thousands of displaced people, including his mother, did not.

Like the others interviewed, he declined to say for whom he voted but said he wanted someone who would let him go home.

The government said a victory for the ruling party coalition, which includes the former rebels of the breakaway group known as the TMVP, would bring massive development to the region.

The opposition United National Party and its allies in the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress accused the ruling party of misusing state resources in the campaign and said the TMVP carried weapons during the campaign and threatened voters and candidates.

Kingsley Rodrigo, head of the People's Action for Free and Fair Elections, an independent monitoring group, said the TMVP threatened and intimidated voters across the province on Saturday as well.

"There are many, many violations taking place," he said.

Other monitors reported gangs of people traveling between polling stations and voting numerous times in Valaichchenai and other nearby towns.

The gangs presented false identity cards signed by local officials saying they lived in the area, said Sunanda Deshapriya, an official with the independent Center for Monitoring Election Violence.

Opposition observers have been threatened and forced to leave many of polling stations, he said. "At almost every station (in the area), stuffing is taking place," he said.

The former rebels have been accused by residents and international rights groups of waging a campaign of terror, killing opponents, extorting money from businessmen and forcibly conscripting new recruits - including children.

In a sign that the violence cuts both ways, a supporter of the ruling coalition, S. Tarek, was attacked by opposition supporters outside a polling station in the town of Eravur, north of Batticaloa, his brother-in-law Mustafa Nazir said. Medical workers said Tarek suffered a broken skull.

Despite the threats and violence, 46 percent of the province's nearly 1 million registered voters had cast ballots by noon, Rodrigo said.

A new round of attacks blamed on the Tamil Tigers cast a cloud over the election.

Suspected rebels bombed and sank an empty navy cargo ship in the eastern port town of Trincomalee early Saturday, but caused no injuries, navy spokesman Cmdr. D.K.P. Dassanayake said.

Rebels fired seven mortar rounds into the village of Pannalgama in the eastern Ampara district, wounding four civilians, including a 10-year-old child, military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said.

The Tamil Tigers have fought since 1983 to create an independent homeland for minority ethnic Tamils, who have been marginalized by successive governments controlled by majority Sinhalese. More than 70,000 people have been killed.