Tigers hindering progress: Rajapakse

President of Sri Lanka Mahinda Rajapakse, now on a state visit to India, said that the conflict by the Lankan Tigers was impending development particularly in the northern provinces. Rajapakse was making his inaugural speech at the first Asian Mayor's conference held in Dehradun.

"In our country we are crafting an all-party approach to our national problem with great success. We have an All Party Conference, an All Party Representative Committee and finally a Memorandum of Understanding between the government and the main opposition party to work towards a consensus on the solution to our ethnic problem, a solution that will sustain itself with all political groups including all the Tamil groups in the country.

"As you know we have several democratic Tamil parties representing the Tamil people, we also have one terrorist group called Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam," he said.

He pointed out that 21st century belongs to Asia just as the 20th century belonged to America and 19th century to Europe."

This is the century in which we, the Asian countries, will be industrialising fast and moving towards an era of plenty and prosperity. Many will complain that progress is slow. They do not realise the obvious -- that a festering wound cannot be healed in a day," he said.

He praised former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for giving more powers to the local self government.

"The reforms of India's Panchayati Raj in the past two decades particularly by those of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi have devolved powers more effectively to local communities.

"We in Sri Lanka are studying India's Panchayati Raj experience to take our lessons from it to evolve Sri Lanka's own model of Maximum Devolution within a Unitary State as a solution to the problems we are experiencing in our north and east," he said.

He warned that cut and paste solutions often do not work because the problems faced by a particular country in respect of development could be different from others. "A serious problem must have an approach that is both inclusive and consensual," he said.

In her opening address Manorama Dobriyal Sharma, Mayor of Dehradun and Chairperson of All India Council of Mayors, hoped that during the three day deliberations the Mayors of different cities from India and Asia would share their experiences both problems and solutions with the others and try and help each other.

"This conference offers us the opportunity to interact amongst ourselves on issues that confront us individually in our own cities and to share the experiences that we have gained in resolving them within our own cultural settings," she said.

Chief minister of Uttaranchal N D Tiwari thanked Rajapakse for visiting the state and hoped that he would not just remain "...Rajapakse but also become janapaksha."

His comment evoked a smile from the visiting head of state.

Mayors from different cities of Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Bangladesh besides India are participating in the conference.