Responding to former Army Chief General Sarath Fonseka’s pledge on Sunday (Nov 29) to defeat President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whom he called a tin pot dictator, Minister Dallas Alahapperuma yesterday said that the Opposition had conveniently forgotten that dictators did not believe in elections.

Addressing the media at the Mahaweli Centre, Alahapperuma challenged the Opposition to explain why Rajapaksa had called a presidential election two years ahead of time had he believed in a dictatorial rule. He also reminded the UNP-JVP-Hakeem-Mano combine that elections to Provincial Councils except the Northern Province had been held during the Rajapaksa presidency. Minister Alahapperuma said that nothing could be further from the truth than the accusation that the President was a dictator.

Had there been an iota of suspicion about President Rajapaksa’s re-election bid, the UPFA would have faced parliamentary elections first, he said. What the Opposition strategists had failed to realise is that elections to eight Provincial Councils had been comfortably won by the UPFA with a majority of 2.6 million votes. The Opposition simply had no way of challenging the Rajapaksa led alliance.

Alahapperuma and Minister Dilan Perera said that at the last presidential elections in November 2005, the then UNP candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe had the backing of both the CWC and the Upcountry People’s Front. But today, President Rajapaksa had their backing.

Perera said that Wickremesinghe secured the Central Province with a staggering 230,000 vote majority whereas the Nuwara Eliya District was taken with 150,000 vote majority. This would not have been possible without the support of the CWC and the Upcountry People’s Front, he said adding that the Karuna-Pilleyan factor, too, would greatly strengthen the President’s hands.

Minister Alahapperuma said that the government, too, admitted that Fonseka’s life was at a grave risk. But the question was, who posed a threat to the former Army Chief’s life, he said warning the war veteran’s attention to be aware of his newly found friends and allies. "One of the architects of Sri Lanka’s triumph over LTTE terrorism is in an LTTE den. They worked for the LTTE openly and did everything possible to throw a lifeline to the LTTE," he said urging Fonseka to be extra careful of his new alliance. He challenged one-time followers of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran to publicly apologise for their actions. He emphasised that the President’s decision to take one time LTTE commanders to his fold could not be compared with Fonseka joining forces with a set of traitors bent on undermining the Sri Lankan State. He said that retired Major Generals Lakshman Algama and Janaka Perera, too, made the same mistake of throwing their weight behind a treacherous political party.

Referring to a statement attributed to Fonseka that he would not be reluctant to receive the support of Prabhakaran’s parents in his quest to abolish the executive presidency, Minister Alahapperuma said that had Prabhakaran been alive, he, too, would have pledged support to the Opposition alliance.

He said that their campaign in the Jaffna peninsula would be launched this week. According to him, the President’s manifesto would be presented shortly by way of an extension to the original policy statement. No other party had even bothered to at least to discuss a previous manifesto for obvious reasons, the minister said.