July 15, 2013, 12:00 pm


By Dasun Edirisinghe

 The JVP yesterday urged the government to establish a civil administration in the Northern Province before the Northern Provincial Council polls due in September.

Addressing a media conference at the party head office at Pelawatta, JVP Propaganda Secretary Vijitha Herath MP said that JVP would not ask the government to confine military and police personnel to barracks, but they should be withdrawn from the civil administration.

Although the government had denied it, the Northern Province still continued to be under the semi–military administration, MP Hearth said, noting that the government used the military for propaganda purposes during elections. "We have been against the provincial councils from the inception in 1987," Herath said, stressing that the JVP’s stand remained the same.

However, the JVP would contest all three provincial council elections to raise public awareness of the provincial councils and the undemocratic rule by the present dispensation, Herath said.

As part of its election campaign in the North, the government sponsored thugs had assaulted a journalist of the Udayan newspaper but the police were not doing anything to arrest the culprits as they were pandering to the whims and fancies of politicians in power, Hearth said. "We don’t think this situation would change even if international observers are brought here to monitor polls."

Hearth stressed that the JVP did not think the 13th Amendment, even if fully implemented, would help solve the ethnic problem.

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