'Caving in' says Govt about Finns' pullout

by Ranga Jayasuriya

Norwegian peace facilitators are still undecided to fill the vacant posts that resulted by the pulling out of Denmark and Finland members of the Ceasefire Monitoring Mission.

The future of the SLMM will be the focal point when Norwegian special envoy Jon Hanssen Bauer visits Colombo this week.

"Mr Hanssen Bauer will take up the issue with the parties concerned. This will definitely be the focus of his visit," Norwegian Embassy spokesman Tom Knappskog told the Sunday Observer.

Meanwhile, the government yesterday described the decision to pull out from the SLMM by Denmark and Finland as "caving" into threat by terrorism.

"This will set a bad precedent. While the entire world is fighting terrorism, this kind of action will give into terrorism, by caving in to terrorist threats," said the government's Defence Affairs spokesman Minister Keheliya Rambukwella.

He, however said, " as far as the Sri Lankan position is concerned, we believe that these vacancies could be filled by other countries after consultation with the LTTE and Norwegians".

The Norwegian envoy's visit comes in the wake of Denmark and Finland, two EU nations, announcing their pull out from the SLMM. The LTTE earlier issued a deadline for them to pull out by September 1.

There are 12 Finnish and eight Danish nationals in the 57-member Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. The SLMM spokesman Robert Nilsson warned of a total collapse of the operations of the ceasefire mission, if the other countries too follow suit.

"If the other countries also decide to pull out, it would affect the peace process and all the people in this country," he warned.

Sweden is the only remaining EU member nation in the SLMM.

The other two representative nations of the SLMM- Norway and Iceland- are not EU members.