Sri Lanka’s president said Wednesday he will strengthen provincial governments to meet long-standing demands for self-rule from the ethnic Tamil minority, an issue that led to a bloody quarter-century civil war in the island nation.
The provincial councils were introduced in Sri Lanka in 1987 after neighboring India intervened to resolve the ethnic conflict. But the system has not been fully functional because Tamil separatist rebels rejected the deal and successive governments usurped powers given to the provinces.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe—in a speech to Parliament—said he will take steps to prevent confusion, overlap, and intervention from the central government in provinces exercising their powers.
Sri Lanka's Tamil community, who make up about 11 percent of the country's 22 million people, consider themselves a separate nation unified with the rest of the island by the British colonial rulers. The separatist civil war broke out in 1983 after years of failed attempts since independence to share power within a unified country.
Since then, the government has faced international pressure to resolve the power-sharing issue through talks.
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