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Colombo hopeful

Nirupama Subramanian

ISLAMABAD: Sri Lanka is hopeful that the June 8-9 Oslo talks will bring the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam back to full-fledged negotiations, a senior government official involved in the peace process said.

"We continue to hope that the LTTE will recognise negotiations as a better option than violence," Palitha Kohona, who heads the Sri Lanka Peace Secretariat and is leading the government delegation at the Oslo talks, said here on Wednesday.

A day after the government blamed the LTTE for two claymore attacks that killed two security personnel, Mr. Kohona said the government was determined to exercise restraint and continue to talk. The Oslo talks would focus only on the role of international ceasefire monitors. "We hope that it will encourage the Tigers to come back to Geneva."

The peace secretariat chief, who was here to attend a U.N. workshop on peace-building on his way to Oslo, denied reports that the new security measures in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo and elsewhere in the country were being misused by security personnel to harass ordinary Tamils.

"There are security operations in the country given the situation today, but every step is being taken to ensure that human rights and liberties are not being violated."

The government had also started the process of evolving a political solution to the conflict. An all-party conference last week had decided to set up a committee of parliamentarians to "come with ideas and evolve a constitutional structure" that would address Tamil political grievances.

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the United National Party also participated in this meet, Mr. Kohona said.

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