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Wednesday, March 05, 2008 - 11.00 GMT |
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Ambassador Goonatilleke speaks on the national conflict in Washington |
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Since his inauguration as Head of State in November
2005, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has repeatedly
said that there will be no military solution to the
conflict in Sri Lanka pursued by the government. He
has reiterated that the only durable solution is a
negotiated settlement.
Ambassador Bernard Goonetilleke made this point as
he spoke at a Roundtable Conference at the Institute
on Religion and Public Policy in Washington DC on
February 26, 2008. The focus of the discussion was
the protracted war with the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in an ancient country steeped in
religious and ethnic diversity, and the ongoing
relief and reconstruction brought on by the 2004
tsunami.
Ambassador Goonetilleke dwelt on the demand for a
separate state called "Tamil Eelam", which
originated in 1976, preceded by the assassination of
Alfred Duraiappah, moderate Tamil Mayor of Jaffna,
in July 1975, by the LTTE. This is considered a
seminal event marking the onset of Sri Lanka's war.
Ambassador also spoke of the six series of
negotiations the government of Sri Lanka engaged in
with the LTTE, from 1985, and how, on each occasion,
the LTTE walked away from the negotiating table in a
calculated strategy. He also focused on the
Ceasefire Agreement the government signed with the
LTTE in February 2002, and abrogated in January
2008, and said that the LTTE began violating the
agreement willy-nilly, within weeks of signing it.
By end April 2007, Tigers had amassed a catalogue of
over 3800 violations as determined by the Nordic
monitors, as against some 300 minor violations by
the government forces. He added that it was during
this so-called "ceasefire," that the Tigers
assassinated foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar,
made two attempts to kill another Tamil minister,
Douglas Devananda, using female suicide bombers, and
employed yet another female suicide bomber in an
attempt to assassinate the commander of the Sri
Lanka Army. The Ambassador said that the violations
of the ceasefire declared by Nordic monitors clearly
establish that the Tigers never ceased firing. What
remained of the CFA, until its recent abrogation,
was an agreement on paper, rendered defunct by the
Tigers, from day one. Ambassador focused on the
concerns expressed by some that Sri Lanka's
withdrawal from the CFA would result in increased
levels of violence, and pointed out that the
increasing blatant violations of the ceasefire by
the Tigers forced the government to take that
decision. If the Tigers had been genuine about a
negotiated settlement, they had a golden opportunity
in November 2005, when President Mahinda Rajapaksa
was sworn in as President of Sri Lanka.
The Ambassador spoke about the 13th Amendment to the
Constitution, which the government has agreed to
implement in full, as a precursor to other
power-sharing proposals to be presented by the All
Party Representative Committee (APRC), which was
appointed by the President in 2006 to achieve a
consensus on proposals for devolution.
On a further positive note, the Ambassador spoke of
the developments in the Eastern Province recently
liberated from the grip of the LTTE, where the
government is earnestly trying to reintroduce
democracy, first with local government elections in
March, and then with provincial elections later. The
people in the east will get an opportunity to begin
a new life as free people.
The Ambassador also described the reconstruction
efforts three years after the 2004 tsunami, with Sri
Lanka being the worst-hit country after Indonesia.
He expressed his appreciation of the outpouring of
sympathy, symbolized by the significant donations by
the U.S. administration, corporate sector and the
public as a response to that natural disaster.
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