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Sri Lanka Tamil United Liberation Front
With very few exceptions, Sri Lankan Tamils have tended to
support their own parties and candidates rather than vote for the
UNP, SLFP, or the Marxist parties. In the July 1977 general
election, for example, only 9 percent of the voters in the Tamilmajority Northern Province supported the two major parties (the
UNP, less closely associated with Sinhalese chauvinism from the
Tamil viewpoint than the SLFP, won 8 of the 9 percent). In the
years following independence, the most important Tamil party was
the Tamil Congress, led by G.G. Ponnambalam, one of the major
figures in the independence movement. A breakaway group led by
another figure, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, founded a second party, the
Federal Party, which began to make inroads into the Tamil
Congress' constituency by advancing proposals for a federal state
structure that would grant Tamils substantial autonomy.
In the early 1970s, several Tamil political groups, including
the Tamil Congress and the Federal Party, formed the Tamil United
Front (TUF). With the group's adoption in 1976 of a demand for an
independent state, a "secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam,"
it changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF).
In the general election of July 1977, TULF won eighteen seats in
the legislature, including all fourteen seats contested in the
Jaffna Peninsula. In October 1983, all the TULF legislators,
numbering sixteen at the time, forfeited their seats in
Parliament for refusing to swear an oath unconditionally
renouncing support for a separate state in accordance with the
Sixth Amendment to the Constitution. In an atmosphere of
intensifying ethnic violence and polarization, their resignations
deprived Sri Lankan Tamils of a role in the legal political
process and increased tremendously the appeal of extremist groups
such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
(see Sri Lanka - Tamil Militant Groups
, this ch.). But in December 1985, the TULF leadership
softened its position and proposed that an autonomous Tamil State
could be established within the Sri Lankan constitutional
framework in a manner similar to the federal states of India.
Data as of October 1988
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