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All efforts being made to stick to ceasefire: Kadirgamar

By Our Diplomatic Correspondent

NEW DELHI, DEC. 7. Sri Lanka is making every effort to ensure the ceasefire with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam holds and that the talks with the Tigers are "resumed at the earliest possible opportunity," the Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, said today.

Addressing the India Economic Summit here, he said the beneficial aspects of the ceasefire, entered into in early 2002, were "clearly visible" in many areas of the country's economic life.

"For instance, tourist arrivals have been rising steadily and have reached an all-time peak this year. However, no finality has been brought to the resolution of the ethnic problem," he stated.

"The LTTE broke off negotiations about 18 months ago. Intense efforts are now going on with the assistance of the facilitator [Norway] and various members of the international donor community to have the talks resumed.

"The current impasse centres around the demand of the LTTE that the talks should be resumed only on a single issue — the question of the establishment of an interim self-governing authority — whereas the Government maintains that the talks should be conducted on a wider basis as agreed in Oslo in December 2002 in order to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement involving internal self-administration based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka. The Government's position is that the establishment of an interim authority should be discussed within the framework of an overall settlement."

Pointing to the many advantages that Sri Lanka possessed like an old, practicing democracy and a well-tried judicial system, Mr. Kadirgamar said coalition governments had come to stay in the country like in other democracies. "This is at once an advantage because political ideologies of all hues find a voice in Parliament and, on the other hand, an inconvenience because no one party has a working majority. The politics of consensus is, therefore, the ruling principle of the country's democratic regime, as in India."

Mr. Kadirgamar said Sri Lanka was the earliest country in South Asia to establish an open, free market economy more than 25 years ago. The country had a literacy rate of 92 per cent, a well-trained workforce and English was widely spoken and understood there.

Growing bilateral trade

On the free trade agreement with India, Mr. Kadirgamar said that when it was signed in 1998 bilateral trade was less than $600 million. Today, it had surpassed $1.3 billion. "Given the unprecedented success of the existing FTA, the two countries are in the final stages of negotiations for a comprehensive economic partnership agreement [CEPA]."

In a separate speech on South Asian integration at the Summit, Mr. Kadirgamar said the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) would be 20 years old in 2005. "Relations between India and Pakistan are the yardstick by which the progress of SAARC is measured. If only those two countries could at least reach an accommodation on economic matters, if not a total resolution of their political problems, the benefits for the region would be immeasurable."

"Political will needed"

Calling for political will to infuse the process of regional cooperation with dynamism and energy, he said: "We have to agree on the specifics of a comprehensive multi-sectoral agenda in areas like trade, investment and infrastructure development."

The South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) signed in Islamabad in January was a significant milestone, he said. "The deadline for making SAFTA operational is 2008; for the South Asia Customs Union 2015; for the South Asia Economic Union 2020. We must forge ahead to meet those deadlines."

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