Sri Lanka’s Tamils say they’ll back president’s challenger

In this Friday, Jan. 2, 2015 photo, a Sri Lankan woman applauds during an election campaign rally of President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Vavuniya, an area with majority Tamil inhabitants, Sri Lanka. Rajapaksa’s power has grown immensely since the war’s end in 2009, when he was hailed as a savior among many Sinhalese for defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels, a campaign that included relentless artillery bombardment that a U.N. report says may have killed up to 40,000 Tamil civilians. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

By Associated Press January 7, 2015 5 min read

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) – The retired postal worker knows who he’s voting against in Thursday’s presidential election.

Like most ethnic Tamils on this island nation, he cannot even imagine voting for the current president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, a man who solidified his power base by crushing a brutal Tamil insurgency and then largely ignored Tamil demands to heal the wounds of the decades-long civil war.

So 67-year-old Santhiyapillai Pathmarajan plans to cast his ballot for the president’s former friend and health minister, Maithripala Sirisena, who defected from the ruling party just a few weeks ago and has created a formidable political opposition.

But he’s not happy about it.

“We will see what a new leader will do,” said Pathmarajan, who lives in Jaffna, in the northern Tamil heartland. “But both (candidates) are evil.”