Sri Lanka Peace Plan Announced : South Asia: President’s proposal would give broad powers to 8 regions. Tamil rebels stand to gain but are expected to oppose idea.

In a bold gamble to end one of the world’s most protracted ethnic conflicts, Sri Lanka’s president Thursday announced a power-sharing plan to transform her island nation into a federal state in everything but name.

“During the 50 years since the end of the colonial era, the aspirations of the Tamil people were not adequately fulfilled within the parameters of the political process,” President Chandrika Kumaratunga said in a nationally televised address.

Now, the president said, she and her leadership are ready to “shun the lust for power” and divvy up many functions of government with Tamil rebels.

Her government’s innovative blueprint, an attempt to end the bloody 12-year-old separatist struggle by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, would redraw Sri Lanka’s political map to create eight largely autonomous regions.

Under the scheme transforming the Indian Ocean nation from a unitary state into a “union of regions,” the Tamils would be given unprecedented possibilities for self-rule in areas where they predominate.

Rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran could become the chief minister of one of the eight regions if voters approved him, according to Mangala Moonesinghe, Sri Lanka’s ambassador to India.

Prabhakaran, a 40-year-old Tamil militant, is wanted in India as the alleged mastermind of the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and India has asked Sri Lanka to extradite him.

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Kumaratunga, 50, was vaulted to power in last year’s legislative and presidential elections largely because of her vow to seek a negotiated end to hostilities with Prabhakaran’s forces, who have been fighting since 1983 for a separate Tamil state in the north and east of the island.

More than 30,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

“Our only goal in this war is peace,” Kumaratunga said Thursday. “But military means alone cannot solve minority problems.”

Her proposed solution, which must be approved by a two-thirds majority of the Parliament and by Sri Lankan voters in a referendum, calls for the central government to retain responsibility for defense, national security, foreign affairs, immigration, airports and harbors, banking and insurance and the issuing of currency.

But some sectors, including land use and ownership, irrigation, police, transportation, industry, education and some forms of taxation, would be placed in the hands of new regional legislatures and boards of ministers.

Central authorities in Colombo would not have the power to fire a regional chief minister; local leaders would have the authority to deal directly with foreign governments to seek loans, assistance and investment. A commission on economic development at the national level would be responsible for preventing disparities among the regions from becoming too dramatic.

The power-sharing plan, the major points of which had already been leaked to the Sri Lankan press, promises equal rights and protection to all of the country’s ethnic groups--majority Buddhist Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims and descendants of Dutch and other European colonists.

“If we fail to seize this opportunity, we will only perpetuate the war,” Y.P. de Silva, a Kumaratunga ally in Parliament, said after he and members of other political parties were briefed by the president on the proposals.

Kumaratunga said her People’s Alliance coalition and minority parties had accepted the plan and said she hopes for the backing of the chief opposition group, the United National Party. There has been scattered resistance from some members of the Buddhist clergy and Sinhalese ultranationalists.

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On the advice of astrologers, Kumaratunga made her first of two television broadcasts to the nation Thursday at 6:40 a.m.--an hour deemed particularly auspicious.

One immediate, obvious problem with the government’s proposals is that its adversary in the civil war, the Tigers, seemed virtually certain to reject them, Moonesinghe admitted to reporters in New Delhi. The ambassador said the government in Colombo has, therefore, adopted a “two-pronged” approach: to continue trying to bleed the Tigers on the battlefield while courting Tamil public opinion with the offer for the devolution of power.

“The military will go at the [Tigers] as much as it can, and [the government will] try to win their hearts and minds and get people to come over,” Moonesinghe said.

The Tigers broke off a 14-week cease-fire in April and reopened hostilities with government forces. Ten thousand heavily armed Sri Lankan troops struck back July 9 in a large-scale offensive dubbed “Operation Leap Forward,” directed at the rebel headquarters in Jaffna in the island’s north.

The government forces advanced but later withdrew, apparently for tactical reasons. They claimed to have killed about 300 Tigers, while suffering losses of 69 killed and 16 missing.

Another potential stumbling block in Kumaratunga’s plan comes from its granting of a key Tamil territorial demand: merging the existing northern and eastern provinces into a single region.

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The plan as summarized in statements given to the press promises “safety and security” for all Sri Lankans but does not spell out how the large Muslim communities in the east, often the target of Tiger attacks in the past, will be protected.