Chandrika Kumaratunga
Chandrika Kumaratunga was president of Sri Lanka from 1994 to 2005, the daughter of two prime ministers, both Bandaranaikes, who took her mother's party from her in 1993, won the parliamentary election of August 1994 that ended seventeen years of the United National Party, and the presidency that November with sixty-two per cent, the largest vote in the country's history, after the Tamil Tigers had killed her opponent at a rally three weeks before. She came to office promising peace with the Tigers and made war on them when the talks of 1995 collapsed. She took Jaffna in December 1995 and lost Elephant Pass in 2000, in the war for peace that cost forty thousand lives in her decade. She was blinded in the right eye by a Tiger suicide bomber at her last election rally in December 1999 and won the election three days later with a bandage on her face. She was born in 1945, studied political science at the Sorbonne and development economics at the Institut d'Études Politiques, married the film star and radical politician Vijaya Kumaratunga in 1978. She saw him shot dead at their gate by the JVP in February 1988, after which she took their children to London for three years. Her father had been shot in 1959 and her husband in 1988, and the presidency's security was the country's obsession. The devolution package of 1995 and 2000 that would have made Sri Lanka a union of regions with the north-east a Tamil region failed in a parliament that needed two-thirds. The Norwegian-brokered ceasefire of 2002 was her prime minister Wickremesinghe's, from the opposing party. She took his three ministries from him in 2003 and dissolved his parliament in 2004 on the ground that he was giving the Tigers a state. The tsunami of December 2004 killed thirty-five thousand and the joint mechanism for aid to the Tiger areas that she signed in 2005 was her last attempt. Her attempt to serve an extra year on a reading of her own re-election date was struck down by the supreme court. She handed over in November 2005 to Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won the war and whom she has opposed since. She has chaired the office of national unity since 2015. She has said the Rajapaksas ruined the country. She remains the family's last office-holder.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: president, politician
