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PEACE TALKS BETWEEN PRESIDENT AND PRIME MINISTER BREAK DOWN AFTER PM REJECTS PLAN TO SHARE POWER OF DEFENSE

Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratung and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesingh in a file photo. Their talks on resolving their power struggle ended without a breakthrough (Photo by Sena Vidanagama/AFP file)

By Walter Jayawardhana reporting from Los Angeles

December 01, 09.30 AM:The peace talks between the President led Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United Front government broke down after Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe rejected the proposal of the President to share power in the Ministry of Defense with the Prime Minister, political sources in Colombo said.

A political deadlock was created after Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe together with Norway withdrew from the negotiations process dubbed “the Peace Process” in Sri Lanka after the President took over the Ministry of Defense together with two other Ministries using her powers under Sri Lanka’s republican constitution vested in the executive President of the country.

Believed to be under Western diplomatic pressure the President Chandrika Kumaratunga started a dialogue with the Prime Minister through a committee consisted of their aides Mano Thittawela, a stock market related advisor to the President and Malik Samarawickreme . the businessman chairman of the ruling United National Party, both representing the rightwing interests of the country.

The proposal to share the power of the Ministry of Defense came through the suggestion published in the government media, now under the control of the President, following the take over of the three ministries taken over by the President recently.

Although a big publicity campaign was launched by Western media regarding the breakdown of the “peace process” actually initiated by Norway by their withdrawal, there was no such process taking place regarding negotiations in peace since it was stalled last April by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) boycotting any peace talks over Washington’s refusal to accommodate them in a meeting regarding aid linked to the “peace process” . Since then no negotiations had taken place between the conflicting parties, although the Western media try to point out the recent conflict between the legislative and executive branches of the Sri Lankan government as a great conflict leading to the break down of the peace process. The country’s second largest opposition party the JVP had called it a tripartite conspiracy between the pro-Western United National Party of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, Norway, alleged to be pro-LTTE and the LTTE itself, as a ploy to take back the Ministries in to the hands of the pro-Western Prime Minister.

In his rejection of the proposal of the President to share power of the Ministry of Defense by having the Deputy Defense Ministry from the ruling United National Party the Prime Minister has demanded the full control of the armed services of the country to manage the so called peace process. The President also proposed to establish what she called a “Joint Peace Council” to oversee and manage the overall peace process. The President has requested Norway to re-implement their role in the “peace process” but political sources in Sri Lanka believe that they would not do anything without the consent of the pro-Western Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe

Earlier last week, Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the LTTE charged that the power struggle between the President and the Prime Minister jeopardized the “peace process” but he did not mention that their boycott last April did actually jeopardized the negotiations process completely. He also threatened to establish a separate state if the government did not establish an interim government for the Eastern and Northern Provinces of the country that would take one third of the country’s land mass and two thirds of the country’s national coast and sea resources. That proposal has been described by both Tamil opponents of the LTTE and most other parties as a stepping stone to the separate state.

(01/12/03 go2lanka.com)