Enlighten public on core issues

It augurs well for Sri Lanka that the head of the Government delegation to the Geneva ceasefire talks, Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, has gone on record that the Government would do everything within its means to bring peace to the country.

It goes without saying that the onus lies with the Lankan State to jumpstart the peace process and keep it ticking and the country could be glad that the Government is taking the initiative to measure up to this major responsibility.

As explained by Minister de Silva, a principal aim of the Government at the talks would be to make the ceasefire a "meaningful" one. The implication of this statement is that the ceasefire at present is far from serving the purpose for which it was established - that is, ending the loss of lives on both sides of the divide and eliminating LTTE terror.

We need hardly say that although the Security Forces have, largely, kept the peace, the LTTE has observed the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) more in the breach. This is the main reason why the ceasefire answers the description of being meaningless.

Accordingly, the Geneva talks would be used by the State to plug existing loopholes in the CFA and render it effective. If LTTE terror is continuing under the CFA, then the agreement is fundamentally flawed and is in need of some revamping.

However, it is also significant that the Government is making an attempt to learn from mistakes made in the past by previous administrations. It is now beyond dispute that the peace process came to be suspended because all important parties to the conflict were not made participants in it. For instance, when the CFA was launched and implemented in February 2002, the then President was kept completely in the dark about it.

Nor was Southern Sri Lanka consulted about the CFA in a significant way. The CFA was a unilateral initiative by the then UNP government and the deficiencies of this approach were soon proved by the criticisms which were levelled against it and the opposition the CFA invited, in particularly Southern Sri Lanka.

It stands to the credit of President Mahinda Rajapakse that an attempt is now being made to form a Southern consensus on the CFA and connected issues through the All Party Conference mechanism. If this is not done, the chances are that the peace process would remain paralysed on account of the opposition it would generate in particularly Southern Sri Lanka.

It is a general state of ignorance which sparks such misgivings and opposition to the peace effort. While the Government should be commended for its efforts at forging a broad consensus on the peace effort in Southern Sri Lanka, it should be also pointed out that the public needs to be consistently educated on the more thorny issues in the peace drive.

For example, President Rajapakse is on record as saying 'no' to a separate state in Sri Lanka but has said 'yes' to power devolution within an undivided, geographically intact country. This message needs to be carried forcefully to all sections of the polity. The public should also be enlightened on power devolution and its ramifications.

Opposition to past peace pacts proved successful because the saboteurs of peace thrived on the ignorance in some sections on the real nature of devolution. It was not realised that power devolution is perfectly possible within an undivided country. Thus, a vibrant public education drive should ideally accompany the current peace effort.