Co-chairs to tighten screws on Lanka

From Neville de Silva in London

The four Co-chairs meeting in Oslo next week are to consider the next step in the face of Sri Lanka’s refusal to bow to western pressure to halt the war, allow international monitors to oversee human rights obligations and to be cowed by cuts in western aid. Norway, which is calling the meeting, is expected to present a rather pessimistic report to its other three partners following Minister Erik Solheim’s meeting with President Mahinda Rajapaksa in Geneva and the president’s uncompromising speech to the ILO conference.

Western diplomatic sources said that since the two-day meeting from June 25 is a routine meeting of this group, it is unlikely that a statement would be issued at the conclusion.

But they said if after the Norwegian report and a comparing of notes it was felt that Sri Lanka needed to be chastised, the Co-chairs would not hesitate to pull all the stops. Although too soon to be certain, there is a feeling gaining ground that the Co-chairs might, at some stage down the line, use a referral process to take the Sri Lanka issue before the UN Security Council for action if the situation deteriorates.

That is if the current assessment is that the peace talks are unlikely to get off the ground soon and there is little evidence of the government taking sterner measures to curb human rights violations reported by international bodies and documented by the Co-chairs, the diplomatic sources said.

According to them, among the matters of immediate concern are:

• President Rajapaksa’s address to the ILO conference. After saying that terrorism has no place in the contemporary world, he reportedly said: “As a government we are not prepared, at any cost, to bow to terrorism.” This is interpreted in western diplomatic and some human rights circles as saying that there will not be any veering away from its present policy of meeting the LTTE head-on.

• Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s interview to the BBC and Reuters in which he accused the West of bullying small countries and said that Sri Lanka had SAARC and Asian support and did not need to depend on the West. He also accused British minister Kim Howells of not condemning the LTTE or terrorism during a recent visit to Colombo and the UN of being misled by LTTE misinformation.
“A key issue here is whether India, the biggest of the SAARC members agrees with this interpretation,” a western diplomat familiar with Co-chair thinking said.

• The reports of the international eminent persons panel led by former Indian chief justice P.N. Bhagwati. This report had been critical of the Commission of Inquiry and the role of the Attorney General’s Department at the inquiry and has called for changes.

• The government’s perceived tardiness in dealing with killings, abductions, disappearances and human rights violations in general.

• The absence of a package of proposals to kickstart the peace talks.

Meanwhile the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) has urged Sri Lanka’s donors to “reassess” their aid to Colombo in the light of human rights violations by the government, the LTTE and other armed groups.

The ICG said that the government’s policies, far from ending the conflict, appear to prolong it and it would be the people who would suffer.

“If the ICG is suggesting that the donors stop aid to Sri Lanka, it is only going to affect the people in general even more and not help them,” one diplomat argued pointing out that Japan had said it would not yield to similar international demands.