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Building bridges

While Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has just returned after yet another vital exercise in bridge-building with Sri Lanka's most powerful neighbour, his Cabinet colleague, Mass Communications, Posts and Telecommunications Minister Imtiaz Bakeer Markar, is now in Jaffna making his contribution to an equally vital bridge-building with the country's northern community.

His dramatic shift of United National Party foreign policy in relation to India has been one significant contribution Ranil Wickremesinghe has made to this country's political history. His first visit as newly elected Prime Minister was to Delhi, and his visit to Delhi and Chennai last week was packed with solid inter-action with our giant neighbour in the three most important spheres of our bilateral relationship: the Sri Lankan peace process, economic ties and our partnership for regional peace and security.

In travelling to Delhi and briefing the Indian leadership on the latest stage of the tortuous peace process, the Prime Minister was meticulously maintaining a certain momentum in that difficult process itself. Delhi's general support for the peace process and the supportive actions that directly emerged from the Prime Ministerial visit itself served to move that process forward.

The formal, public Indian affirmations of support, the mutual sharing of views on the process and the conclusion of bilateral agreements, all serve, firstly to further validate the current peace process and, and by, affirming the direction of its movement, also to nudge it forward.

If Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga made history by being the first major Sinhala political leader to visit Chennai and talk with Eelamist militant groups long before anyone other leader dared do so, Ranil Wickremesinghe broke new ground when visited the Tamil Nadu capital in the mid-1990s and, in his then controversial declaration on 'assymetrical devolution', was the first political leader to acknowledge the specific aspirations to regional self-rule by the Sri Lankan Tamil community. Today, Mr. Wickremesinghe's pronouncement may be seen to have been clearly a prophetic one.

If the last few UNP governments' foreign policy posture have tended to lean Westwards and this party's estrangement from Delhi peaked with President Ranasinghe Premadasa's regime, Ranil Wickremesinghe has very quickly reaffirmed something that the founders of his party, including the late J.R. Jayewardene, cherished: the civilisational umbilical cord that links our island society to the Sub-continent.

The Prime Minister also made a categorical pronouncement of Colombo's perspective of the problems in Indo-Pakistani relations: that the complex issues involved can only be resolved through bilateral negotiations. This was a timely move by Sri Lanka to formally clarify our posture vis-…-vis regional inter-relationships just when the stability and security of the region is under duress due to powerful tensions in those relationships.

Not to be content with his bridge-building in Delhi, the Prime Minister cut more new ground when, in Chennai, he announced intentions to explore the possibility of building a bridge that would physically link Mannar with Dhanushkodi.

In a business-like emulation of his Prime Minister, Mass Communications Minister Bakeer Markar today launches a series of initiatives in Jaffna that will be fundamental to the revival and consolidation of communications between the once estranged and isolated North with the rest of the country. While declaring open a Jaffna branch office of the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited (ANCL), Minister Bakeer Markar will commission postal and telecommunicational links between the Peninsula and the rest of the country.

The physical disconnection of communications with the North due to the war was a further weakening of communications between the already estranged ethnic communities. The resumption of telecommunications and mass media links will now serve to consolidate the ties that are being renewed between all communities following the Cease-fire Agreement and the revived peace process.

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