The country's president calls her prime minister spineless. The prime minister calls the president a "Hitler madam."
Words like "worm" and "snake" fly between them regularly.
While Sri Lanka struggles to end a 19-year civil war, the country's two leaders, once childhood playmates, are locked in a battle of petty bickering.
Battle-weary Sri Lankans worry the fragile ceasefire between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels won't hold for much longer -- not because of occasional clashes, but because of the animosity between the two leaders.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe argue about nearly everything, from who will give important speeches to who will head what government ministry.
But the most bitter topic is the peace process.
Both insist they want peace for this embattled island nation, where two decades of civil war have cost the lives of 65,000 people, as ethnic Tamil rebels have fought to carve out a homeland in the country's northeast, dominated by the Hindu Tamils.
Wickremesinghe signed a February last year Norwegian-brokered ceasefire agreement with rebels that ended the fighting. Six rounds of talks aimed at finding a political solution were held before the rebels walked out in April.
Kumaratunga says the prime minister caved in to Tiger demands for autonomy without insisting they disarm first, or stop violating human rights.
In an 11-page letter in October, Kumaratunga blasted Wickremesinghe for putting the country's security at risk in the name of peace.
Repeatedly, she has threatened to use her broad powers to fire the prime minister and dissolve parliament.
The animosity between the two is likely to further intensify when the rebels spell out their demands for political and financial authority in the northeast. Their proposals were expected to be released tomorrow.
Sri Lanka's sharp political divisions have many worried.
"A united voice in this crucial time ... is critical to move forward successfully," US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca said during a May visit.
The feud climaxed at the international level in early September, when the two leaders were unable to agree on who would represent Sri Lanka at the UN General Assembly.
Kumaratunga eventually gave in, saying she would not attend. She told UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that her absence was "due to the situation at home."
The bickering has given the rebels more excuses to stay away from the negotiating table.
"Your administration is unstable and caught up in a ferocious cohabitation war with the all-powerful president," Anton Balasingham, the chief rebel negotiator, wrote in a letter to Wickremesinghe in June.
Unsurprisingly, the two put the blame on each other.
Kumaratunga's spokesman, Harim Peiris, says Wickremesinghe ignores her.
But Kumaratunga declined to meet Wickremesinghe before he left for the UN, saying she was "indisposed." She has refused to meet with him on several other occasions.
Raised in Sri Lanka's small political elite, the two were friends as children. That ended when their political careers took off.
Kumaratunga was re-elected president in December 1999, three days after the Tigers tried to kill her in a suicide attack. She rode a sympathy vote to narrowly defeat Wickremesinghe and installed her aged mother as prime minister.
Undeterred by the defeat, Wickremesinghe fought and won the prime ministership in 2001 parliamentary polls, the most violent the country has seen, with 61 deaths in a six-week campaign.
Since then, the bickering has seldom let up.
Kumaratunga, 58, has publicly accused Wickremesinghe, 54, of trying to assassinate her. During parliamentary campaigning, Wickremesinghe called Kumaratunga a dictator -- a "Hitler madam." Kumaratunga said the prime minister is "without a backbone."
Observers say the two must learn to get along.
"It is up to people with social leverage to force a cohabitation arrangement with national interest," said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, a top political analyst who heads the Center for Policy Alternatives, an independent think-tank.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS