Implement ceasefire, Govt. tells SLMM

Amidst confusion and contradictory signals on the war and peace process, a top official said yesterday the Government had told the Scandinavian ceasefire monitors to fully implement the existing Ceasefire Agreement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

This statement by Government Peace Secretariat Chief Rajiva Wijesinha followed statements made by government leaders who proclaimed that they would call for amendments to the CFA which they claimed was ‘non-functional’ and just a ‘piece of paper’.

Dr. Wijesinha told The Sunday Times the government had not called for amendments to the CFA, instead it had told the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) chief Lars Solberg it wanted the CFA fully implemented.

“What we are trying to do is to implement certain aspects of the agreement (CFA). These aspects have not been fully implemented, Dr. Wijesinha said. Citing an example, he pointed out that the SLMM had provisions to rectify or correct a situation under the agreement, but currently little or nothing was done to correct such a situation.

He said that certain parts of the agreement had not been enforced properly in the past and the government wanted more effective implementation of some of these aspects.Increasing the number of monitors was one of the factors taken up by the SLMM and the peace secretariat during two rounds of talks on Friday and the previous week, Dr. Wijesinha said.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa in the run-up to the Presidential elections in November 2005 declared that the CFA would be amended and the monitoring mechanism reviewed. As an immediate step towards fully implementing the CFA, the SLMM’s Batticaloa and Trincomalee offices which were closed after the foreign monitors pulled out due to security reasons would be fully functional from next week with foreign monitors returning.

SLMM spokesman Thofinnur Omersson told The Sunday Times that 12 monitors had arrived from Iceland and Norway to beef up monitoring activities and the number would go up to 30 enabling them to carry out their work more effectively. The SLMM head on Wednesday met LTTE Peace Secretariat Chief S. Pulidevan and military spokesman Irasiha Illanthirayan in Kilinochchi for talks on implementation of the CFA. The meeting with the LTTE representatives was the first in three months.

Currently the monitoring activities in Jaffna and Mannar are carried out by the Vavuniya SLMM office. In a related development, Norwegian Ambassador Hans Brattskar is due to travel to Kilinochchi in the next few days to brief the LTTE about the outcome of the talks held by the Co-chairs in Oslo last week.