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Geneva gladly throws open gates
Friday, 27 January 2006 - 3:12 AM SL Time
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Switzerland yesterday welcomed a breakthrough in Sri Lanka`s stalled peace process between the government and the LTTE and said it was ready to host both sides next month.
Sri Lanka`s peace broker Norway clinched a deal between the government and the LTTE to resume talks in Geneva next month to salvage a ceasefire agreement.
The Swiss embassy in Colombo said Switzerland was ready to provide Norway with logistics to get the talks under way.
'Switzerland supports the peace process under Norwegian facilitation. Therefore, it has declared itself ready that talks between the conflict parties can take place in Switzerland,' the embassy said in a statement.
Meanwhile Norway`s special peace envoy Erik Solheim who worked out the deal between the government and the LTTE said yesterday patience was needed and would be key to any success.
Mr. Solheim, said when he started as a facilitator in Sri Lanka`s peace process he would not have believed there would be so little progress in eight years.
'When I started on a full time basis, I thought it would maybe take half a year,' Mr. Solheim told Reuters after finally persuading the two sides that Switzerland was a mutually acceptable venue for fresh talks.
'Patience was important in this process and it still is. It will not be sorted out in a few months', he said.
Norway is aiming to replace Solheim -- who is now also the country`s international development minister -- with a new envoy, but diplomats say replacing his personal relationship with key figures, including reclusive Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, is all but impossible.
Sitting in his Colombo hotel room with his shoes kicked off and looking visibly exhausted, Mr. Solheim said he was pleased senior members of the two sides -- although not their leaders -- had agreed to meet to discuss the ceasefire`s implementation. 'It`s definitely important -- a clear positive step forward, but only one step. There had been a gradual turning to the worse for the last months, definitely now there is a step in the right direction. The parties can use this momentum to find a way to stop the violence and the killings and, based on that, move closer towards a settlement', Mr. Solheim said.
'There is real enthusiasm for peace but possibly not real enthusiasm for the necessary compromises,' Mr. Solheim said. 'I would not advise on the specifics of the compromises. It`s a complex matter.'
He said there was a risk that some elements might try to disrupt or sabotage the process.
'The big risk is spoilers who want to produce violence to undermine this positive effort,' Mr. Solheim said. 'At the moment the parties should do their utmost to stop violence, but they should not let violent elements and spoilers derail the process.'
Norway was willing to continue its attempts to broker a lasting settlement as long as it believed both sides ultimately wanted peace and were not using the Norwegians -- invited because of their experience in West Asia -- for their own ends, he said. But getting an agreement among the island`s majority Buddhist Sinhalese and minority Tamil-speaking Hindus, Muslim and Christian communities would take time, he said.
'I think there`s no other place in the entire world where four major key world religions are meeting themselves on one small island and they all make up a substantial part of the population,' Mr. Solheim said. 'If this was easy to solve, it would have been solved a long time back.'
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