|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 15 September 2002 |
 |
|
 |
Editorial |  |
| News Business Features Security
|
Please forward your comments to the
Editor, Sunday Observer. E-mail: [email protected] Snail mail : Sunday Observer, 35, D.R.Wijewardana Mawatha, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Telephone : 94 1 429239 / 331181 Fax : 94 1 429230 First round The excitement of the international cricket contest now on here will not distract millions of Sri Lankans within the country and all around the world from their focus on a single room at a facility in a small Thai naval port town over the next three days. The first priority for us will be the progress in the first round of formal political negotiations between the Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. After all, even international cricket tourneys will not come this way again, let alone social and economic progress, if Sattahip, Thailand, does not produce results of a sort. Expectations are not high. Sri Lankans have been through too much suffering and despair, too many initiative and failures, too much rancour and deceit on all sides, to have any illusions about the difficulty of peace-making. If war weariness and a belated realisation of the hard realities of our national predicament have pushed all sides in the conflict towards conciliation and a political solution, it is ultimately our collective sense of decency and justice that will guide our progress towards that solution. It is that revived civilised sensitivity that will restore the world's faith in Sri Lanka's ancient and resplendent civilization. And the world is watching anxiously, along with all of us as Gamini Lakshman Peiris, Milinda Moragoda, Rauf Hakeem, Bernard Goonetilleka, Anton Balasingham, Visvanathan Rudrakumaran, Jay Maheswaran and Adele Balasingham meet together in distant Sattahip on behalf of all Sri Lankans. The delegations' welfare is in the able hands of host country Thailand, a land of Theravada Buddhism, while Norway, famous for its peace-making globally, awaits on the sidelines as the tireless, patient facilitator and mediator. The hopes for peace will reflect many dimensions of aspirations by our different communities, political parties and militant organisations and, all of these aspirations must be met in some form in settling the ethnic conflict. The sheer complexity of the crisis, however, seems less complex in the light of the profound injunctions of the many faiths and philosophies that inspire Sri Lankans. Ultimately it will be a fidelity to those injunctions that will show us the way out of the tangle of conflicting interests. Conflict can only be mediated by the upholding of the norms of justice over the dynamics of rivalry and contest and, the future of the negotiations rests on this simple fact. If our delegates in Sattahip, this time round and in the future, are to forge ahead, they need the assurance that their constituents back home do value those norms. Presidential leadership Is the country going to the negotiating table without the leadership of its head of state? Sri Lankans would be well justified in raising this question as the Government and LTTE delegations head for distant Sattahip to begin a gargantuan effort for peace on behalf of all Sri Lankans. While most, if not all, political parties, civic groups, religious dignitaries, and many other society leaders have already expressed their hopes for success, the silence of the country's First Citizen, our elected executive head of State is deafening. President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga has made history as being the first major Sinhala leader to meet the Tamil militant leadership in both Chennai and Jaffna at a time when everyone else decried peace-making in favour of war and dominance. It was her regime that elaborated on possible models for a just political settlement by means of a draft constitution in the face of much political hostility and public derision. In doing so, she has paved the way for the peace of today and the hopes of tomorrow. These hopes are being daringly carried forward by Ranil Wickremesinghe's Government. What they now need is the public endorsement of the President who originally nurtured them. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
