A week in Sri Lankan politics is no time at all!

A week in Sri Lankan politics is no time at all! Here in Sri Lanka the temperature is soaring both the meteorological and the political sense. The Geneva talks ended on a rather surprising upbeat note 23 February 2006 but it seems to have been downhill ever since. Both sides continue business almost (has to be said not quite to the violent levels of a few months back) as usual. Children are still purportedly being taken in by LTTE for ‘voluntary training’, according to a recent UNICEF statement and Sri Lankan security forces still seem to be giving safe haven to break-away LTTE groups. A turn up for the books today. Monday 14th April, is that the JVP seem to have indicated that they’ll accept an Indian Federal type constitutional settlement. Somehow I can’t believe that and we’ll probably find a correction by a leading JVP spokesperson in the press tomorrow.

However on the bright side Mahinda Rajapaksa is proving to be a probably much abler politician than his predecessor Chandrika. She has thoroughly destroyed any chance of acquiring ‘elder statesman’ credibility, and last week ‘fled’ to London after a squabble over leadership of Bandaranayake’s political party the SLFP, when the party is heding for important local Government elections. It hardly seems possible that the 'President of the party, which she still is, should be out of the country during vital campaigning time. I think there’s a strong possibility she’ll settle in the UK in the long term never quite able to come to terms with her family finally being levered from the leadership of the political party her father founded.. Sad really – she could have retired gracefully from direct politics and played a sort of ‘apolitical’ Jimmy Carter/Bill Clinton type role. Well that’s not going to happen now.

A surprise to many of us was a visit by John Paul Lederach to Colombo last week as the guest of Inpact, local agency engaged in various conflict transformation activities. I have chosen the picture of his lecture to a small assembled group of local and expatriate people engaged in various dimensions of peace building, to show here. One of the most enduring images which comes to mind from his short talk is the metaphor of the spiders web as applied to conflict transformation. The spider builds its web very strategically with key anchor points and main cables intersecting in the centre, but each segment can survive damage to any one area. Conflict transformation should similarly be built from many segments, strategically cooperating but the failure of any individual initiative will not impede the whole. We’re all hoping he’ll be back.

The local Government elections are just 2 weeks away and as yet news of campaign violence seems mercifully small. However, yet again, there are major problems. The Tamil National Alliance of the North and East has called for the elections to be postponed, as have the major national independent election monitors, PAFREL. The Courts have issued various injuctions and legal instructions halting the elections in some districts and the Elections Commissioner has a complex task in sorting out the legal muddle. I think we may well hear later this week that the elctions are postponed for another couple of months giving time, hopefully, for a new electoral register to be used and for voter ID to be introduced. Both improvements which many political parties seem to resist. If these provisions can be implemented it will give the election results much more credibility.