COLOMBO: Sri Lanka hopes a recent truce and plans to lift an economic embargo will enable talks with Tamil Tigers to focus on the key rebel demand of a separate state, the country’s new foreign minister said on Wednesday. But the new government does not favour a separate state for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Tyronne Fernando said on the eve of the arrival of a Norwegian team that will advise the government on how to push forward the peace process.

The two sides have been edging closer to talks since last month’s election of the pro-peace United National Party (UNP), followed closely by matching ceasefires and a government announcement that it would lift a crippling embargo on rebel areas from next week.

The moves will help meet some of the grievances of the Tamil people living in the north and east of the country and also should help lessen demands for a separate state, Fernando said.

“I think we have come a long way, but of course the core issue is ultimately what is the alternative to eelam (a separate state)?” Fernando said in an interview. “Their solution to the grievances is a separate state, so we have to offer something that will settle their grievances other than through a separate state. They have to give up the call for a separate state and settle on something else,” he said.

The Norwegian deputy foreign minister Vidar Helgesen, was expected to meet President Chandrika Kumaratunga, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and Fernando. “These are the exploratory steps to make this facilitation real,” Fernando said of the Norwegians, who also met Anton Balasingham, the spokesman and chief negotiator for the LTTE, in London last week.

There have been reports that the Tigers want any talks to be held in neighbouring India, and Fernando said he was not against that. “We are not opposed in principle to having these talks outside Sri Lanka,” he said.

The truce is the first to be observed simultaneously by both sides in seven years, raising hopes of talks to end the ethnic conflict that has claimed an estimated 64,000 lives. The ceasefire and the easing of the economic blockade were two of the pre-conditions set by the LTTE for talks to begin.

A demand that a government ban on the rebel group be lifted has been played down since the UNP replaced the more hardline People’s Alliance government of Kumaratunga in parliamentary elections last month. “I hope that this insistence on the proscription being lifted before talks is not going to be an issue,” Fernando said. Little progress has been made on the substance of the ethnic dispute despite four previous attempts at negotiations.—Reuters