Editorials
Tuesday, December 21, 1999

Support for Chechnya
war reflected in vote

The issue: Political parties promising continued market reform won most seats in Russia's Duma, its lower and more powerful house of parliament.
Our view: Support for the war in Chechnya had more to do with the results than market reform.

SCANT encouragement about Russia's transition to a market economy came from the country's third parliamentary elections since the 1991 fall of communism.

Election results were less a reflection of public support for market reform than a result of outrageous campaign tactics and groveling to pro-war sentiment regarding Chechnya. The results are not likely to induce the government to heed Western appeals to moderate its tactics in the war.

Except for the Communist Party, again the top vote-getter, political parties in Russia consist of make-shift alliances or personal allegiances.

The runner-up Unity and Medved (Russian for bear) bloc was formed in the last two months in support of President Boris Yeltsin's anointment of his most recent of many prime ministers, Vladimir Putin, as his successor in next year's presidential election.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and presidential candidate Yevgeny Primakov, Putin's predecessor as prime minister, cobbled together the third-place Fatherland-All Russia alliance.

The campaign focused on the battle between the Putin and Luzhkov-Primakov factions, and it was not pretty.

When Primakov went abroad for back surgery, state television reported he was terminally ill. A network controlled by tycoon Boris Berezovsky linked Primakov to an assassination attempt on Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze.

News reports from media owned or controlled by the Kremlin repeatedly tied Luzhkov to the notorious killing of an American businessman a few years ago.

The trashing apparently took its toll. The Luzhkov-Primakov alliance drew less than 13 percent of the vote, far behind the Communists (24.2 percent) and Unity and Medved (23.4 percent).

A party formed around several ousted Kremlin market reformers attracted 8.7 percent, and that would have been far less had it not jumped on the Chechnya war bandwagon. The Yabloko party of reformer Grigory Yavlinsky, who has remained aloof from the Kremlin and against the Chechnyan war, barely surpassed the 5 percent threshold required for representation.

The superpower nostalgia associated with the flexing of military muscle in Chechnya seems to have carried the day, while virtually all candidates -- even the Communists -- gave lip service to market reform to lure future Western economic support.

Roughly half of the electorate supported the four centrist parties, and they were set to claim more than half the seats in the Duma. This indicated that Yeltsin could have a cooperative parliament for the first time. But in view of the history of bungled market reform in post-Soviet Russia, that is not much assurance of real progress.

Sri Lanka leader

The issue: Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga was wounded in an assassination attempt.
Our view: Sympathy for her in the wake of the attack may help her win re-election.

SYMPATHY for President Chandrika Kumaratunga in the wake of an assassination attempt may help her to victory in her bid for re-election in Sri Lanka. Kumaratunga was wounded by a suicide bomber at a campaign rally Saturday. Two explosions that day, the latest in a long series of terrorist attacks, killed 33 people and wounded 180,

Addressing the nation from her hospital bed, the president urged all sides to join forces to wipe out terrorism.

Little noticed by the rest of the world, Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, has been engulfed in a civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils for 16 years, and no end to the violence is in sight.

Kumaratunga was voted into office five years ago on a pledge to end the fighting. She managed to open negotiations with the Tamil rebels, called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

But the talks collapsed when the rebels violated a cease-fire by blowing up two naval ships. The war has dragged on inconclusively since.

Kumaratunga is a member of a political dynasty like the Gandhis in India, and like the Gandhis the family has been a victim of assassination.

Her father, Solomon Bandaranaike, was prime minister when a Buddhist monk assassinated him in 1959. The mantle of leadership passed to her mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who became the world's first woman prime minister in 1960. She is now in her third term as premier in her daughter's cabinet.

In addition, Kumaratunga's husband, a film actor turned politician, was shot dead near his home in a Colombo suburb in 1988.

After his death she fled the country but returned in 1992 to assume the leadership of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the main party of the ruling People's Alliance coalition. She led the coalition to a parliamentary victory in 1994 and subsequently was elected president.

Her government has been working on a new constitution that would give a measure of autonomy to regional councils, including a Tamil-administered area.

But she has been frustrated by the opposition's refusal to support her proposals. Meanwhile the military campaign against the rebels has stalled.

Kumaratunga hopes the election will give her a fresh mandate to enable her to complete her efforts to end the war. The failed assassination attempt may have tipped the balance in her favor.

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Published by Liberty Newspapers Limited Partnership

Rupert E. Phillips, CEO

John M. Flanagan, Editor & Publisher

David Shapiro, Managing Editor

Diane Yukihiro Chang, Senior Editor & Editorial Page Editor

Frank Bridgewater & Michael Rovner, Assistant Managing Editors

A.A. Smyser, Contributing Editor