Lanka offers compromise to end peace deadlock

Sri Lankan Buddhists offer flowers before a statue of Lord Buddha at a temple in Colombo early yesterday at the start of a campaign to pray for peace. PHOTO: AFP

An official said the government is ready to make concessions on a venue for talks when Norway's International Development Minister Erik Solheim launches his mission today to salvage a 2002 ceasefire, in the face of almost daily killings of rebel supporters and troops.

Proposed talks on shoring up the ceasefire between the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been held up over a bitter dispute on a venue, with the rebels calling for Oslo and the government backing an Asian capital.

"The president is now agreeable to go someplace else," a senior official close to Rajapakse, who declined to be named, told AFP.

"Solheim will be told that we are ready to compromise on the venue issue in the interest of getting talks started."

Government spokesman Nimal Siripala de Silva said he was hopeful that Solheim would be able to break the deadlock in the talks and get the two parties together for an ice-breaking meeting.

"What is important now is for the two sides to sit at a table. What they discuss and other matters like an agenda can be discussed. We must first get to the table," de Silva told AFP.

"We now have positive signals that both sides may be moving towards a round of talks by the middle of February," said a diplomatic source close to the peace process.

Colombo also hopes that US Under Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns will exert pressure on the LTTE to halt attacks and sit down to talk when he arrives this week.

Burns and Solheim were to meet here Monday, with Burns "to reiterate the strong US desire to see all Sri Lankans work for peace," the US State Department said last week.

Burns is not due to have direct meetings with the LTTE unlike Solheim, who is set to talk with LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran and London-based chief negotiator Anton Balasingham.

A sharp rise in violence since early December -- with 146 people, including 84 security personnel, killed in the north and east -- threatens to reignite an ethnic conflict which has left more than 60,000 dead since 1972.

The government has accused the LTTE of unleashing the violence while the rebels maintain the attacks were carried out by "ordinary people" who were harassed by security forces.

The LTTE in a statement Sunday said two civilians had been killed in the northern peninsula of Jaffna on Friday while the military said two rebels and two policemen were killed on Saturday.