Broad consensus on devolution

Simon Gardner

COLOMBO : A raft of Sri Lankan political parties has reached broad consensus on a cross-party devolution proposal aimed at ending the island’s civil war, the minister drawing it together said on Wednesday.

Tissa Vitharana, minister of science and technology and chairman of the All Party Representative Committee, said he aimed to complete a draft and hand it over to President Mahinda Rajapaksa by the end of next week.

However, while the international community has high hopes the cross-party initiative could help revive a peace process that has collapsed into renewed war, the LTTE has dismissed it.

“We have reached a broad consensus on a proposal for devolution,” Vitharana told Reuters in a telephone interview. “We have reached consensus on the unit of devolution to be the province, and within the province, we have agreed that the district would be a major administrative unit,” he added.

He said President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which had earlier wanted to devolve power to the island’s minority Tamils at a district had compromised.

“By and large we agreed that we should come back to a Westminster type of government, a parliamentary government, to take effect from the end of the present President’s term of office,” Vitharana said.

Rajapaksa was elected in late 2005, and his current term is due to expire in 2011.“There are one or two thorny problems that have to be sorted out,” he added. “The other major problems have been settled.”

He said the issue of whether to refer to Sri Lanka as “unitary” under the devolution proposal, which the government wants, had yet to be resolved. “They all agree they’re not too bothered provided the safeguards are there to ensure that separatism is not, as it were, encouraged by the constitution,” Vitharana said.

“By and large everyone seems to be happy with the structures we are setting up. Now it has come down to the question of terminology.”

Reuters