Sri Lanka polls: Rajapaksa wins, Fonseka cries foul

COLOMBO: Mahinda Rajapaksa on Wednesday won a landslide mandate for six more years as Sri Lanka's president from voters in seven of the country's nine provinces, largely made up of majority Sinhalese, but Tamils and Muslims joined hands in the north and east to support his rival, former army chief Sarath Fonseka.
State TV said Rajapaksa secured 5.5 million votes to Fonseka's 3.9 million — a ringing endorsement of his first term and a reward for trouncing the LTTE even as Fonseka vowed to file a legal appeal.Fonseka spent the day in a five-star hotel surrounded by troops. Rumours that he was about to be arrested were dismissed by the government, which said he was a free man and the soldiers were providing him security.
Officials said nine "army deserters" were arrested from the hotel. Fonseka also reportedly sought help from India. Government sources confirmed his approach.
Soon after election commissioner Dayananda Dissanayake announced that Mahinda Rajapaksa has emerged victorious in Tuesday's presidential election, his ally-turned-rival Gen Sarath Fonseka alleged rigging and said that he had asked the poll panel to nullify the vote.
"We ask him to declare null and void the results. We have asked him not to release the results as we are going to go to court," he told reporters. "Our strength is people and their franchise has been disregarded," said the general, credited with finishing off the Tamil Tigers.
Rajapaksa added more than a million votes to his tally of 2005, when he won his first term in office in a close election, aided by a Tamil boycott. In percentage terms, he won 58% of the votes this time, much above the 50% he polled in 2005. Fonseka managed to poll 40%. From 1,80,786 in 2005 — a gap small enough to have been bridged by minority votes this time — Rajapaksa's victory margin went up 10-fold.
The predicted close contest for Sinhala votes — which would have thrown up the possibility of Tamil and Muslim votes playing a decisive role in choosing the winner — never came about. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), a party propped up by the Tigers before the latter were eliminated last May, had campaigned for Fonseka. Their performance was a political statement rather than a useful addition to the opposition numbers.
Fonseka outgunned Rajapaksa — backed by the pro-government Eelam People's Democratic Party in the north and a breakaway faction of the LTTE in the east — in Jaffna and Vanni districts in the north. In the east, which has a mixed ethnicity, Fonseka was ahead in the overall results in Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Digamadulla districts, indicating that Tamils and Muslims put up a combined fight against Rajapaksa's return.