Negotiations with LTTE are on course, says Bogollagama

NEW DELHI: Sri Lanka’s new foreign minister, Rohitha Bogollagama, sworn in just three days ago flew in to the capital on Tuesday to brief Indian leaders on the latest turn in the island’s politics.

Bogollagama met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Wednesday morning before leaving for Berlin for a meeting with his German counterpart. His mission is to persuade Germany to renew the aid package which was suspended due to alleged human rights violations by the government forces.

The minister said he was in Delhi at the time when President Mahinda Rajapakse had sworn in an all-part government which represented the “southern consensus” required for presenting a united front while negotiating with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The Tigers had often pointed out that the Sinhala Buddhist majority of the island had not put its act together and no government was in a position to offer concrete solutions to the LTTE. This was because whatever was put on the table by the ruling coalition had to be abandoned because of opposition by political parties as well as Buddhist monks and hardliners.

President Rajapakse had spent the first year in office building a southern consensus, literally by breaking up the United National Party. The fact that the opposition leader and former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe’s UNP had walked out from an agreement with the President because he had engineered a defection in the UNP was pushed under the carpet by the minister.

“Our negotiations with the LTTE are on course. The President’s efforts have been to build a consensus and make everyone stake holders in the peace process,” Bogollagama told reporters. However, he remained non-committal when asked whether the Sinhal Buddhist majority in the island was willing to give up the unitary constitution.

The LTTE wants substantial autonomy so that the Tamil majority will have a modicum of self rule. But both the monks, and large sections of Sinhalese, are not in favour of giving up a constitution that is completely centralised. They want Sri Lanka to remain a Sinhala Buddhist country.

“We will finally have a Sri Lankan model which will accommodate the aspirations of all people living in the island — Sinhalese, Buddhists and Muslims,” Bogollagama explained without saying whether the majority were willing to abandon the unitary constitution.