PM Modi with Ranil Wickremesinghe
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe will convene an all-party conference on Wednesday to address the sticky topic of ethnic reconciliation for the island’s minority Tamils.
The President convened the meeting to address the Government’s National Reconciliation Programme and the next steps.
The all-party meeting follows the president’s two-day visit to India last week, during which he visited Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mr. Wickremesinghe had agreed to the full implementation of the 13th Amendment (13A) to the Sri Lankan Constitution with all-party consensus prior to his Delhi visit at a meeting with Tamil parties represented in the north and east provinces.
The 13A was India’s pioneering action in 1987 to try to resolve the problem of political autonomy for Tamils in Sri Lanka. It established nine provinces as devolved units, with the north and east provinces temporarily merged.
The opposition parties in Sri Lanka appeared divided over their participation in the all-party meeting.
While leaders of all political parties and independent groups with representation in parliament have been invited to attend the all-party meeting on national reconciliation, some opposition parties have alleged that they are unaware of the specific topic.
“We have not been informed of the meeting’s agenda. But we will go for the sake of the people”, said Sajith Premadasa, a senior opposition leader in Sri Lanka’s parliament.
He stated that his party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), reserved the right to leave the meeting if it turned out to be a political ploy rather than a sincere endeavor.
While the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the second largest opposition party, has stated that they will not attend, other political parties have stated that they will.
“We will be going”, stated Dayasiri Jayasekera of former President Maithripala Sirisena’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party.
During his meeting with Wickremesinghe in New Delhi, Prime Minister Modi expressed hope that the Sri Lankan leader will be committed to enacting 13A and holding provincial council elections. He advised the Tamils to live with dignity and respect.
Sri Lanka has a lengthy history of failed negotiations to resolve the Tamil allegation of discrimination by granting some sort of political autonomy.
After achieving independence from Britain in 1948, the Tamils made their demand for autonomy, which escalated into a brutal military conflict in the mid-1970s.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged a violent campaign for a separate Tamil homeland in the island nation’s northern and eastern provinces for nearly 30 years before collapsing in 2009 after the Sri Lankan Army assassinated its supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
According to Sri Lankan government data, over 20,000 persons have gone missing as a result of numerous wars, including a three-decade horrific war with Lankan Tamils in the north and east that killed at least 100,000 people.
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