The Rediff Special /J N Dixit

Sri Lanka: Does peace have a chance?

Three years ago on this day President Ranasinghe Premadasa was killed by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during an election meeting. That assassination led to fierce attacks by the Sri Lankan armed forces on the Tamil militants.

Now Liam Fox, a undersecretary in the British foreign office, has apparently resolved the differences between the government and the opposition to pave the way for talks with the LTTE. Though this has been read as a peace effort involving both the authorities and the LTTE, British officials stressed they had no contact with the militants. In this article, J N Dixit, the former foreign secretary who has served as India's high commissioner in Colombo, discusses the background and prospects of the British peace initiative.

The recent visit to Sri Lanka by undersecretary in the British foreign office Liam Fox reportedly resulted in a new peace initiative to resolve the festering ethnic crisis there.

Fox apparently had lengthy discussions with President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickramasinghe, the leader of the main opposition United National Party, during which he persuaded both the UNP and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party to take a joint stand on endorsing proposals to resolve the Tamil-Sinhala conflict in the island. Some memoranda have been exchanged, confirming President Kumaratunga's commitment to consult the opposition and to keep it informed of the initiative that she is taking to resolve the ethnic crisis.

Wickramasinghe has apparently given a commitment that his party would not obstruct the implementation of the proposals for narrow partisan gains.

There was also speculation about Fox having given indications to the Sri Lankan government that he had been in touch with the LTTE through its offices in London and Europe, and that the British government may be able to facilitate the resumption of a dialogue between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil militants.

Tentative hopes have been generated that the ongoing violence in Sri Lanka might be brought to an end through British mediation. Whatever the catalyst, ending violence in Sri Lanka is an unexceptionable objective. It would be worthwhile analysing the factors which led to this effort.

Kumaratunga's proposals for meeting Sri Lankan Tamil aspirations were mooted in 1995. But further initiatives taken by her to push forward these proposals have been stalled due to three reasons:

First, the main Sri Lankan Opposition party, the UNP, opposed these proposals. Second, Kumaratunga stipulated pre-conditions that the LTTE should completely lay down arms and abjure violence. Third, the LTTE rejected this precondition and also the substance of the proposals, claiming that they did not meet the basic demands of Sri Lankan Tamils.

British persuasion may have succeeded in overcoming the UNP's opposition to Kumaratunga's proposals in the short term. Fox may have conveyed the British government's hope that it could persuade the LTTE to resile from its present rigid negotiating stance. The expectation is that British meditation may forge some sort of a solution. These are some possible reasons for this effort being made at all:

First, the Sri Lankan power structure always had a subconscious emotional link with the British. Former presidents Jayawardene and Premadasa were not averse to British or British-led Commonwealth mediation to resolve the ethnic crisis during the 1980s and early 1990s. This most recent development may be a crystallisation of this feeling into policy.

Secondly, the Sri Lankan Tamil expatriate community in England and in Europe may have sent signals to the British government that their intervention would be acceptable to the LTTE since it would be devoid of the handicaps involved in meditating through India, the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation or the great powers.

Third, LTTE's most effective political and publicity branch offices are in London with more in different European countries. The British government, along with other European governments, could perhaps persuade the LTTE to return to the negotiating table, given the LTTE's dependence on the goodwill of these governments to continue its political and publicity activities in west Europe and north America. These considerations could generate impulses for a renewal of negotiations. Concrete prospects, however, are subject to basis attitudes and ground realities.

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