Norwegian peace envoys were due in Sri Lanka yesterday in the first efforts to restart the island's peace process with Tamil rebels since voters elected President Chandrika Kumaratunga's party to power last month.
Talks with the Tamil Tigers to end 20 years of civil war have been on hold for one year, with efforts to restart them snarled in a political feud between Kumaratunga and her rival, former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, that led to the snap poll.
"It is a process which has been on hold for almost one year, so this is the initial meeting," said one presidential aide.
The Tigers and government are sticking to a Norwegian-brokered truce holding for more than two years, but the rebels have said they will only state their stand on resuming negotiations after Norway briefs them on Colombo's position.
They say talks must prioritize humanitarian needs in the war-torn north and east -- the center of their struggle for a separate state -- and proceed on the basis of a power-sharing proposal they put forward last November.
Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister Vidar Helgesen and peace envoy Erik Solheim were to hold talks with the president today, and Solheim will travel to the rebel-held north tomorrow to meet the Tigers' political wing leader, S.P. Thamilselvan.
Kumaratunga said after the election restarting talks would be her priority, but she has also said she was compelled to call the early poll because Wick-remesinghe had compromised security by being too soft on the LTTE in his bid to end the war that killed 64,000.
Getting the process on track will also be complicated by divisions within her United People's Freedom Alliance coalition and by a new parliament deeply divided along ethnic lines.
"The anti-peace process propaganda at the recently concluded election has left a residue that needs to be dealt with by the new government," the National Peace Council, an independent think tank, said in a statement.
Kumaratunga has so far avoided the differences within the Freedom Alliance -- which includes a Sinhalese nationalist party opposed to any devolution of power to the rebels -- by handling the peace bid largely on her own.
But that too is fraught with danger, with a history of distrust between Kumaratunga and the Tigers, who tried to kill her in a 1999 suicide bomb attack after an earlier peace bid she spearheaded broke down.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS