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Although substantial areas of the Eastern Province had been under the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, by mid-2007 the government was successful in driving the LTTE out of those areas. The local government elections were conducted under more peaceful conditions than anticipated.

The forthcoming provincial council elections will be the first ever for the Eastern Province as a political unit. The last and only time that the voters there experienced a provincial election was 20 years ago, in 1988. At that time the Eastern Province was temporarily merged with the Northern Province under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of 1987, which lasted until 2006 when the Supreme Court declared the merger to be invalid.

The merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces, which together comprise about 30 percent of the country's land mass, and which ensured a Tamil majority administration, was the price that India demanded from Sri Lanka in order to disarm the LTTE and restore peace.

The provincial council for the merged North East Province was dissolved by a presidential decree in 1990 after its Chief Minister Varatharaja Perumal, frustrated by the lack of power and resources granted him by the central government, made a futile unilateral declaration of independence. In an ironic twist, provincial councils were established in the seven Sinhalese-majority provinces that did not ask for devolved power, but that too with only partial powers given them. After the negative experiment in operating the provincial council in the northeast, no further provincial council elections were held in either of those two provinces.

Several political circumstances appear to have induced the present government to take up the challenge of elections. The first is that the election of the new Provincial Council could consolidate the separation of the Eastern Province from the Northern Province, by putting elected representatives from the east into positions of power that they would be reluctant to give up thereafter. While this would be a blow to Tamil nationalism, which considers the two provinces to be the Tamil Homeland to which Tamils have special claim, their separation would assuage those who fear that a merged North East is a recipe for a future breakaway bid for independence, like Kosovo.

Second, by bringing back the ballot to areas that had been totally ruled by the gun, the government obtains a political triumph. The elections were won convincingly by the armed breakaway faction of the LTTE, the TamilEela Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal -- also known as the Karuna Group -- which has allied itself with the government in what turned out to be a one-horse race. This may have led the government to believe that it could repeat its triumph in the larger Eastern Province.

On the other hand, the boycott of the elections by the Tamil National Alliance and the United National Party, the two main opposition parties that could have given the TMVP a battle for the votes of the people, undoubtedly assisted the TMVP to score victory without having to resort to violence. Both the TNA and UNP boycotted the Batticaloa local government elections on the grounds that the TMVP's retention of their arms posed a security threat to rival candidates.

Third, holding the provincial elections for the east would do something to respond to the growing international demand for the government to embark upon a viable political process that could result in a political solution to the ethnic conflict. The government's answer, through the All Party process, has been to offer the 13th Amendment that was the outcome of Indian intervention in the country's ethnic conflict in the latter half of the 1980s and which culminated in the signing of the Indo Lanka Peace Accord of 1987. The government has pledged to fully implement the 13th Amendment that established provincial councils with devolved power to the provinces.

The problem for the government, however, is that the pursuit of these larger political objectives of consolidating the separation of the Eastern Province and assuaging the concerns of the international community may not necessarily lead it to victory in the forthcoming elections. The victory obtained by the government and its ally, the TMVP, at the local government elections in the Batticaloa district may not be repeated at the elections for the entire province. The TMVP's special strength in the Batticaloa district, which is predominantly Tamil, will not carry over to the rest of the province, and in particular to the Trincomalee and Ampara districts, which are predominantly non-Tamil.

In addition it is clear that at least the UNP will be contesting the Eastern Province elections despite the TMVP continuing to retain their arms. There is an obligation upon the government to ensure that the TMVP does not resort to violence or the threat of violence during the election. The generally peaceful manner in which the Batticaloa local government elections took place may have served to reassure the country's largest opposition party that contesting the elections will not translate into an automatic death sentence for its candidates at the hands of the TMVP. The UNP would also have seen that elections are the lifeblood of democratic politics and that boycotting an electoral process seldom wins admiration and inevitably leads to political marginalization.

Needless to say, a positive electoral verdict for the government will embolden it to continue on its present path of military conquest over the LTTE followed by elections that consolidate government rule over previously LTTE-controlled areas. The success of this strategy in the east would encourage the government to continue with its military campaign in the north against the LTTE, although it seems to have slowed down at the present time due to inclement weather conditions and stiff resistance by the LTTE.

On the other hand, if the UNP-led opposition should get the upper hand in the Eastern Province elections, it would cast doubt on the long-term viability of the government's counter-LTTE strategy. This means that the stakes in these elections are very high, and the temptation to resort to violence to win at any price has to be resisted.

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(Dr. Jehan Perera is executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, an independent advocacy organization. He studied economics at Harvard College and holds a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School. ©Copyright Jehan Perera.)