BY
Meera Srinivasan
A group of Opposition MPs in Sri Lanka, representing Tamils from the north and east, hill country (Malaiyaha Tamils), and Tamil-speaking Muslims on Sunday sought the full implementation of the 13th Amendment to ensure “existing rights are not snatched away”.
The contentious 13th Amendment, born out of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987, has remained in Sri Lanka’s Constitution for nearly four decades without seeing full implementation, as successive regimes in Colombo have refused to part with power over crucial areas including land, and law and order.
Some within the Rajapaksa administration are calling for its repeal deeming the provincial councils, created consequent to the Amendment, “white elephants”. The 13th Amendment is the only legislative guarantee thus far for a measure of power devolution that many in the southern Sinhala majority consider “too much”, and most in the Tamil polity consider “too little”.