Workable Ideas

(January 31, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) Conflict anywhere is detrimental to peace. This thought is universally accepted but the irony is that it rarely, if ever, gets translated into action. Each of the South Asian countries is currently embroiled in problems relating to political stability, ethnic harmony and economic development, giving the impression that the entire region is on the boil. Beneath the surface calm, there are undercurrents of violence.

Sri Lanka, for instance, is fast turning into a war zone with Colombo carrying out daily land and aerial strikes against the strongholds of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelum (LTTE), which, ironically, is vigorously trying for peace after being pushed into the defensive. Buoyed by the success of its attacks on selected northern and eastern LTTE targets, Colombo is justifying its resort to a military solution to the decades-old ethnic crisis. India has already welcomed the interim recommendations of the All Parties Representative Conference which are strikingly similar to the basic premises of the Indo-Sri Lanka 1987 peace accord.

President Mahinda Rajpaksa has welcomed them as constituting an “auspices and important initial step” towards a political settlement. However, the absence of a consensus within Sri Lanka’s political class over the APRC report being taken as the basis for a renewed Colombo-LTTE dialogue has created a deadlock that threatens the interim report’s fate just as political differences led to the collapse of the Colombo-New Delhi accord.

The idea of treating the province as the unit of power, and the devolution of powers between the Centre and the provinces, formed the core of that accord, and the ARPC has built upon it to recommend immediate implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution enabling early elections leading to the actual dissolution of powers. The negativism of major parties like the Janata Vimukta Peramuna and United National Party threatens the implementation of the ARPC report also. New Delhi may like to ask itself whether it can help avert a stalemate by playing a facilitator’s role in securing the report’s political acceptance and initiating negotiations on it.