|
|
 |
 |
|||
Senior government officials said today that
prospects for peace talks with the Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)
were “undiminished,” despite the LTTE’s recent abortive attempt to
take the Sri Lankan Army base at Elephant Pass. Responding to concerns that a Norwegian-sponsored
attempt to bring the government and the LTTE to the negotiating table was
in danger of floundering, officials said that at this stage that the
Tigers in particular were essentially “jostling for the best position”
ahead of talks. Military sources also said that the recent heavy
build-up of Tiger forces south of Elephant Pass and the subsequent attack
should be understood as signs that the Tigers wanted to be in the most
favourable position possible before negotiations begin. However, sources cautioned against interpreting this
to mean that the Tigers did not want peace. “You can’t panic about the peace process every
time someone throws a hand-grenade,” one official said. Officials said that, since peace talks were still
some way from starting, recent incidents were best understood a reflection
of the existing status quo, which was that the country is current at war. “If it continues after peace talks and
de-escalation start, then only we will have a problem,” the officials
said. During his last visit to Sri Lanka to lay the ground
work for a possible rapprochement between the two adversaries, Norway’s
former Foreign Minister Knut Vollebaek stressed that the path to peace was
a long one which would inevitably be fraught with difficulties. Officials said that it would probably wise to take a
long-term view of the recent Elephant Pass fighting, and accept it as one
of the difficulties that Vollebaek had predicted. “We don’t like, but we’re not surprised by it,
and we can’t afford to be shaken by it,” one official said. Diplomatic sources in Colombo have advanced the idea
that, in the frequency and style of recent attacks, Sri Lanka might be
seeing the beginning of the end of the era of terrorism. Similar, more
violent, episodes of terrorism, comparable to that which occurred in
Rajagiriya recently, have also been seen in other countries during
negotiations towards a final settlement, most notably in Spain. In Spain, a group known as the “young biting
dogs,” formed a breakaway section of the terrorist Basque separatists.
These “biting dogs,” brought up knowing nothing but the ideology of
terrorism, became particularly vicious in its attacks against Spanish
civilians. In a parallel development, guerrillas of the Hamas
movement, an extremist splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation
Organisation, also conducted an intensified series of terrorist attacks
including bombings in the commercial capital of Tel Aviv as peace talks
between the PLO and the Israeli government edged towards substantive
progress. “Thus it might be said that Sri Lanka is at the
beginning of the end of terrorism,” one diplomat said.
|
|
Contact Information: Send
mail to