By Charles Haviland BBC News, Colombo

	Jaffna has been peaceful but Kilinochchi was marred by violence during the elections

The Tamil National Alliance or TNA also won half the councils at stake in the ethnically mixed east.

But President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government swept to victory in all the other areas being contested, indicating that ethnic polarisation is still an issue in the country.

These elections were held in a number of councils around Sri Lanka.

But there were clusters in the war-affected north and east and this is where the news spotlight has fallen.

The victorious party, taking 18 out of 26 councils, was the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), which projects itself as the main representative of the northern and eastern Tamils.

During the war the TNA was in effect a political proxy of the Tamil Tiger militants.

It is now more moderate and accepts that Sri Lanka will remain united with no place for separatism.

But it wants considerable devolution for the provinces, including the Tamil-dominated ones – more devolution than President Rajapaksa will agree to, and their talks with him on political reforms of that nature have so far yielded nothing.

Outside the north and east, every contested council was taken by the governing coalition.

But the Sinhalese-dominated government failed to win in the north despite lavishing the area with ministers, money and posters during the campaign.

It had wanted to do well there to ward off international pressure on human rights.

Civil society groups and Tamil politicians accused the government of using scare tactics and threats during the campaign.

The government denied it and the election commissioner said the actual voting day was largely peaceful.