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.
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