Colombo: Sri Lanka's main Tamil party on Sunday won a whopping landslide in the first semi-autonomous council elections in the island's north after decades of ethnic war.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) swept all five districts in the Northern Provincial Council which went to the polls Saturday, the department of Elections results showed.
The TNA bagged 30 out of a total of 38 seats in an election held under a system of proportional representation.
Sri Lanka's Tamil-majority Northern Province and two other regions on Saturday voted to elect three provincial councils, four years after the Tamil Tiger rebels were vanquished.
Over four million people were eligible to vote in the Northern, North Western and Central provinces, the government's news portal news.lk reported.
Serpentine queues were seen in front of polling centres as hundreds of ethnic Tamils, young and old, cast their votes in Jaffna. In Matale, Mannar, Kandy, the queues spilled over to the roads. Elderly and disabled voters were carried by their relatives to polling stations.
"We want a settlement for the Tamils. That's why we came to vote this time. We've been waiting so many years - now we want peace," an elderly woman voter told BBC.
The Northern Province is the only region which has never had its own council, BBC said.
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