Colombo, Sri Lanka – Former defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, accused by rights groups of war crimes during the final months of Sri Lanka’s long-running civil war a decade ago, has confirmed he plans to run for the presidency in the wake of the Easter Sunday attacks that have shattered the country’s uneasy peace.

Rajapaksa, the brother of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, told Al Jazeera that he would stand as a candidate in elections due by late 2019.

“Definitely I’m contesting,” Rajapaksa said with a chuckle during an interview in the book-lined study of his home in the capital, Colombo, photos from his military career hanging from the walls.

“I have decided long time. Otherwise there’s no need for me to renounce my US citizenship.”

There has long been speculation that Rajapaksa, a Sri Lanka-US dual citizen, will campaign for the presidency. 

Rajapaksa has to renounce his US citizenship in order to run for president. His name does not appear on the most recent quarterly filing to the US registry on those who have lost their citizenship, which covers the three months until the end of March.

He insists he is not being an opportunist in revealing his plans in the wake of the attacks on churches and luxury hotels that killed more than 250 people and have fuelled a wave of mob violence against Muslim communities.

“I don’t consider it as an opportunity,” he told Al Jazeera. “It is not the elections, but it is our country and nation. Something I focused on is destroyed. I’m worried and saddened because of that.”

‘Strongman’s appeal’

Investigative journalist Lasantha Ruhunage said Rajapaksa would have a “strongman” appeal given his role in defeating the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in a conflict that came to a bloody end on a narrow strip of beach on the island’s northeast in 2009.

“There would be an appetite for him among the masses,” Ruhunage said. “But it’s not just him; it’s the ‘strongman’. People are moving towards military strongmen rather than the traditional politicians because of the record of the incumbent politicians.”

The Easter Sunday bombings exposed the depth of ill-feeling between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as each blamed the other for the government’s failure to act on detailed intelligence warnings that attacks were imminent.

Rajapaksa claims the government’s decision shortly after it came to power in 2015 to detain and investigate senior military officers amid allegations of wartime rights violations contributed to the failure.

But during the decade that he was defence secretary, the military was accused of a wide range of abuses – from torture to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings – creating a climate of fear among journalists, activists and government critics. 

A United Nations panel found breaches of international law by both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. It also said that some 40,000 civilians died in the army’s brutal final push against the Tamil Tigers. 

Charu Lata Hogg, a researcher at Chatham House in London who has briefed the UN on Sri Lanka, said Rajapaksa’s return would be a “step backwards” for justice and accountability.

“The real significance is that someone who led an army that has been accused of perpetrating war crimes will not be held to account and will be in a position of political strength,” she said. “It’s also symbolic in the sense of being a slap in the face for Tamil justice and is not at all supportive of reconciliation.”

As defence secretary, Rajapaksa said he ran what he describes as a “sophisticated and well-trained” network of 5,000 military intelligence agents, and dismissed accusations of human rights abuses.

“Those are all baseless allegations,” he said. “You talk about human rights, you talk about freedom of individuals, you talk about reconciliation, but all these depend on national security. If you don’t have national security what happens … do you have freedom? Everything depends on national security.”

His voice becomes increasingly shrill.

“This is a military that defeated such a ruthless, dangerous, powerful terrorist organisation,” he said, referring to the Tamil Tigers. “I’m wondering whether all this was done by rogues. Murderers … Are we saying that our military…

“There can be individuals. But if you take the whole picture you are generalising. Even internationally, they are generalising this.”

Search for justice

The Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, make up around 75 percent of Sri Lanka’s 22 million people, but the island has significant numbers of mostly-Hindu ethnic Tamils, as well as Muslims and Christians and has struggled with rising communal tension since independence from the British in 1948.

After a series of measures that privileged the Sinhalese over the rest of the population, the Tamil Tigers began their violent campaign for a separate Tamil homeland in the island’s north and east in the 1970s.

Ten years after the fighting finally came to an end in 2009, there has been little attempt to address the lingering resentments that helped fuel the conflict – even though Sirisena came to power promising reconciliation and accountability. A 2015 pledge to investigate wartime atrocities has still to be met.

According to Amnesty International, Sri Lanka has one of the world’s highest number of disappearances – as many as 100,000 over the past three decades.

Analysts say Rajapaksa, who remained in his post for five years after the war ended, also bears responsibility for the instability that continues to plague the country.

“Justice is an essential part of achieving a sustainable peace,” Anjali Manivannan, senior legal analyst at People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL), told Al Jazeera.

“The cause of the conflict, the structural discrimination, the Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism and supremacist beliefs that place Sinhalese Buddhists at a higher level than other communities on the island … None of that has really changed. They defeated the LTTE and won an armed conflict, but there have been no steps to address why that conflict started.”

Rajapaksa himself has been accused of war crimes and extra-judicial killings. 

In April, Ahimsa Wickrematunga, the daughter of murdered journalist Lasantha Wickrematunga, filed a lawsuit accusing Rajapaksa of instigating and authorising her father’s killing in 2009. He is also facing a case filed by a Tamil man who says he was tortured in 2007 after being detained by the police’s Terrorism Investigation Division, which came under Rajapaksa’s command.

Rajapaksa has denied the allegations.

Once the election is called, and Rajapaksa formally launches his campaign, many believe that the past will probably matter little to the majority of voters, while Rajapaksa will portray himself as the man who can restore stability to a troubled island.

“I don’t see him limiting his use of existing or new emergency laws just to focus on the problem of Islamist extremism,” said Darsha Jegatheeswaran, senior researcher at the Adayaalam Centre for Policy Research in Jaffna.

“Over the last (few) years, there have been communities that have been critical of the government, of him, human rights people have gone public … My concern is that if he comes back to power and his focus is on a ‘threat to the nation’ in the past that has been anyone critical of the government.

“I think he would be quite heavy-handed.”

A senior Iranian legislator has called for the United States and Iran to hold talks in Iraq or Qatar to defuse tensions amid a US military build-up in the Gulf.

Hashmatullah Falahat Pishe, head of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, urged negotiations on Friday, citing attempts by “third-parties” to provoke a conflict despite senior officials in Tehran and Washington rejecting war.

“There must be a table in Iraq or Qatar where the two sides can meet in order to end this tension,” the independent legislator said in a post on Twitter.

The appeal came as US President Donald Trump also softened his rhetoric on Iran. Asked on Thursday if Washington was going to war with Tehran, the president replied, “I hope not”. That comment came a day after he expressed a desire for dialogue, tweeting: “I’m sure that Iran will want to talk soon.”

Trump’s tone contrasted with a series of moves by the US and Iran that have sharply escalated tensions in the Middle East in recent days.

On May 5, John Bolton, US national security adviser, announced that the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group would be rushed from the Mediterranean to the Gulf ahead of schedule in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings”.

He did not give details on the nature of the threat from Iran, but warned that the US would use “unrelenting force” should Iran stage an attack on its troops in the region. 

De-escalation

Since then, four oil tankers, including two belonging to Saudi Arabia, were targeted in an apparent act of sabotage off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, according to officials in the region, and Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels from Yemen attacked a Saudi pipeline.

The US also ordered non-essential staff out of Iraq and dispatched additional military assets to the region.

The US moves came a year after Trump pulled Washington out of a 2015 international accord that put curbs on Iran’s nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief. The Trump administration then reimposed crippling sanctions on Iran and also designated the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a “terrorist” entity. 

Iran responded by declaring US Centcom a “terror” organisation. 

Trump has said he wants to negotiate a new deal with Iran that includes tougher curbs on its nuclear and missile programmes and on its support for proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. 

However, Washington’s hardline approach has exacerbated bellicose rhetoric and prompted fears of a conflict. 

On Friday, an official with the IRGC warned that Iranian missiles can “easily reach warships” in the Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East. The semi-official Fars news agency quoted Mohammad Saleh Jokar, deputy for parliamentary affairs of the IRGC, saying that Iran’s missiles have a range of 2,000km. 

The Mehr news agency quoted Iranian army chief warning the US against miscalculations. 

“If the enemy miscalculates and commits a strategic error, it will receive a response which will make it regret [its action],” said Major General Abdolrahim Mousavi. 

And soon after Falahat Pishe’s call for dialogue, Iran’s supreme national council, headed by President Hassan Rouhani, said “remarks by an individual should not be taken as a statement of policy”, according to Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi.

Reporting from Tehran, Basravi said the council reiterated that only it had the power to set policy on behalf of the government. 

‘Sitting by the phone’

Senior Iranian officials, including an IRGC commander, have also rejected Trump’s previous invitations for talks, saying the US was “unreliable”.

Earlier this week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said Tehran would not negotiate another nuclear deal with Washington. He also said there would be no war with the US. 

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has urged the nuclear deal’s remaining signatories – Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany – to take “concrete steps” to protect the pact. 

In Washington, a senior administration official said the US “sitting by the phone” but has heard no message from Tehran that Washington is willing to talk directly.

“We think they should de-escalate and come to negotiations,” the official, who declined to be named, told Reuters.

Mohammad Marandi, professor of English literature at Tehran University, said Iran is unlikely to enter into fresh negotiations with the US on its nuclear programme as it does not trust the US.

“The Iranians are saying we cannot trust a government that does not abide by agreements made by the state. Hypothetically, if Iran reaches another agreement with the US, Trump could tear that up, too, whenever he wants,” he told Al Jazeera.

“In addition to this, by [engaging in talks] Iranians are saying they would be appeasing the US and encouraging it to violate agreements in the future in order to get more concessions.”

United States President Donald Trump has decided to wait up to six months before determining whether to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and parts from the European Union and Japan. This gives trade talks more time for the US to make a deal.

The White House had faced a Saturday deadline to make a decision on US Commerce Department recommendations to protect the domestic auto industry from foreign imports on national security grounds.

In addition to averting domestic pain, delaying the decision avoids what was shaping up to be a new dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s trade disputes around the world – including its trade war with China.

But now Trump is directing US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to pursue further negotiations and report back within 180 days. If those discussions are unsuccessful, Trump will then decide “whether and what further action needs to be taken”.

In a proclamation released on Friday, Trump said he agreed with a Commerce Department Study that found some imported cars and trucks are “weakening our internal economy” and threatening to harm national security.

“Important innovations are occurring in the areas of engine and powertrain technology, electrification, lightweighting, advanced connectivity, and autonomous driving,” said the proclamation. “The United States defence industrial base depends on the American-owned automotive sector for the development of technologies that are essential to maintaining our military superiority.”

Fierce opposition

Trump’s proclamation said “domestic conditions of competition must be improved by reducing imports”. But auto tariffs face strong resistance from both parties in Congress, to whom Trump has not released the “Section 232” investigation report.

Automakers have strongly opposed the tariffs, arguing they would raise prices, threaten hundreds of thousands of US jobs, and decrease industry spending on self-driving cars.

The administration cited statistics that show US-owned companies now account for a far smaller share of the total US automobile market than they used to, comprising 67 percent of the market in 1985 (10.5 million units)  versus 22 percent (3.7 million units) in 2017. 

During the same time period, the administration said, imports nearly doubled, from 4.6 million units to 8.3 million units. Trump’s decision could impact some 47 billion euros ($53bn) worth of car and auto part exports.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Trump that “successful negotiations could allow American-owned automobile producers to achieve long-term economic viability and increase R&D spending to develop cutting-edge technologies that are critical to the defence industry”.

But many “foreign” cars are made on US soil by American workers using US parts, and so the foreign-car distinction is often blurry.

Toyota Motor Corporation has said the tariffs “threaten US manufacturing, jobs, exports, and economic prosperity”.

General Motors last year warned that import tariffs could hurt workers and lead to a “a smaller GM” while isolating US businesses from the global market.

‘You can’t have both’

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing Toyota, General Motors and others, said that companies remain “deeply concerned that the administration continues to consider imposing auto tariffs”.

The group said that since 2017, automakers have invested $22.8bn in new and existing facilities in the US, but “increased auto tariffs threaten to undo this economic progress. At the end of the day, you can have tariffs or investment, but you can’t have both”.

Trump had agreed last July not to impose punitive tariffs on imports of EU cars as both sides looked to improve economic ties.

Meanwhile, EU steel and aluminium makers remain subject to punitive US import tariffs. The measures, also based on concerns about national security, prompted EU countermeasures, with increased tariffs on motorbikes and other US products.

At the same time, Europe has also engaged in talks with the US and Japan to rewrite global trading rules to limit state subsidies and forced technology transfer, with eyes clearly on China.

And though future car tariffs might not send the EU rushing to Beijing, they could undermine efforts to bring US allies on board with China trade policies.