Sri Lanka’s “Joint Opposition”, staunch supporters of former president Mahinda Rajapakse, yesterday said it will defeat President Maithripala Sirisena’s government in the coming months and form a new regime.
Joint Opposition member of parliament (MP) Udaya Gammanpila told Xinhua news agency that a procession by the Joint Opposition that had begun from Kandy in central Sri Lanka on July 28 had received “tremendous support” from the public.
Thousands had already joined the procession which will conclude in capital Colombo this week, Gammanpila said.
“Despite the hindrances by the government to stop this procession, we are going to go ahead and make sure we gain a majority in parliament soon.”
Certain members of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) who are part of the existing coalition government had also shown their support and had informed their supporters to join the procession, he said.
Sirisena, in a statement on Saturday, said any street protests would not shake his regime and the government formed between the SLFP and the United National Party (UNP) would continue for the next five years, reversing an earlier decision of working together for two years.
Sirisena said his government has dedicated itself to fulfilling the mandate given to the people and would continue with its economic and development plans.
Foreign minister slams Rajapakse: Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera yesterday said that Rajapakse’s government failed to investigate cases of people who went missing during the three-decade civil war.
Samaraweera in his statement accused Rajapakse of going back on an agreement he had with the UN soon after the war with the LTTE ended in 2009.
“This was also evident when he and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agreed to an accountability process in their 2009 joint communique, which was later made into a formal commitment to the international community,” Samaraweera said.
Rajapakse had claimed that the current government was betraying the country’s security forces through the legislation on the Office of Missing Persons (OMP) to probe the cases of missing people.
“It is your failure to investigate these allegations and if they are true punish the few miscreants in high positions who may have acted unprofessionally and thereby clear the name of the armed forces as an institution, that is the true betrayal of the armed forces,”
Samaraweera said.
The OMP is a truth-seeking investigative agency and it does not make judgements on disputes, he said.
In fact, the legislation states that “the findings of the OMP shall not give rise to any  criminal or civil liability,” he said.
Its primary function is to establish whether a missing person is dead or alive and, if they are dead, discover when, how and where they died. The OMP will require technical expertise that is not available in
Sri Lanka, Samaraweera argued.
“Any Sri Lankan citizen going missing is a tragedy. It is the government’s duty to investigate and determine the fate of any of its citizens who are missing,” he said.
The purpose of having an exclusion of the Right of Information Act is to ensure that those who know the fate of missing or disappeared persons can transmit that information without fear.
The OMP is a mechanism designed to discover the truth of a missing person’s fate and not act as a prosecutorial or judicial body, he said.