Sri Lankan leader gives green light to peace talks

Sri Lanka’s president today asked Norway’s peace envoy to set up new talks with Tamil rebels in hopes of staving off a civil war, but the separatists continued to brace for a possible return to battle.

Daily violence in the country’s north and east continued, meanwhile, with three Tamils killed, including two linked to the guerrillas.

President Mahinda Rajapakse and Norwegian envoy Eric Solheim held a “lengthy and cordial” one-on-one meeting today, said presidential spokesman Lucian Rajakarunanayake. Other officials close to the president said Rajapakse told Solheim to pursue fresh talks with rebels quickly.

Rajapakse was flexible as to the location for negotiations, the officials said. The rebels want them to be in Norwegian capital, but Rajapakse’s political allies in the past have opposed Oslo as the venue.

According to the officials, Rajapakse told Solheim he would not be rigid about the location for the talks.

In a round of high-stakes shuttle diplomacy, Solheim will take the president’s message to rebel-held territory tomorrow, when the envoy is scheduled to meet with Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tigers’ reclusive leader.

The rebels said yesterday they had begun training ethnic Tamil civilians for combat to bolster their ranks in case war with the government resumes. Renewed violence has taken at least 120 lives in recent weeks, according to the military, police and a northern-based human rights group.

Today a journalist was shot and killed in the eastern port city of Trincomalee, but the motive was not immediately clear.

Subramaniyam Sugitharajah – whose newspaper Sundar Oli had highlighted the Tamil Tigers’ demands for autonomy – was fatally shot by a lone gunman, police said.

In another attack in Trincomalee today, unidentified gunmen killed an ethnic Tamil known to be close to the Tigers.

This afternoon in Jaffna in the north, gunmen on a motorcycle fatally shot a man believed to have been an intelligence operative for the rebels, a police officer there said.

Yet despite the relentless killings, Solheim – who helped negotiate a cease-fire between the government and rebels in 2002 – told reporters he still hoped to prevent a return to full-scale civil war.

“There is never a last minute to stop a war,” he told the Foreign Correspondents Association of Sri Lanka on today.

In the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi, civilians of all age groups - from school children to grey-haired elders – gather every afternoon at a public playground in the rebel stronghold for a session of military education that the rebels call self-defence training.

Por Piriyan, a rebel official in charge of training, said 13,000 civilians had been enlisted in the district for training.

“We don’t want to start a war again. But if it is thrust on us, it is important that all the people are ready to face it,” he said yesterday.

More than 65,000 people from both sides have died since 1983 when Tamil Tigers started their violent campaign to create a separate state for the country’s 3.2 million Tamils accusing the 14 million majority Sinhalese of discrimination.

The nearly four-year-old truce halted fighting temporarily, but peace talks broke down a year later when the Tigers withdrew, demanding from negotiations more autonomy to Tamil-majority regions.