January 5, 2003	Sunday	Ziqa’ad 1, 1423

COLOMBO: European and Asian invaders brought bloody violence to Sri Lanka for centuries in their quest for its spices and gems, but now it is foreign governments that are helping the island solve its own internal war.

The years of foreign invasion were followed by an even more bloody ethnic conflict that has engulfed the teardrop-shaped island in the Indian Ocean for the past 30 years.

But the Norwegian government, with the support of Sri Lanka’s former colonial masters, has sought to bring peace to the country, and the feuding Tamil rebels and the Colombo government will meet for a new round of talks in Thailand on Monday.

The last of the imperialists to leave was Britain which granted independence to the island, then known as Ceylon, in February 1948. However, it left behind simmering ethnic tensions between majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils.

The Sinhalese trace their origins back to a North Indian prince, Vijaya, whose father banished him for disobedience.

He and 700 followers set sail and landed in Sri Lanka, according to the Mahavamsa, the fifth or sixth century AD Pali-language text written by Buddhist monks which records the island’s history.

Vijaya took a native princess of the yaksha or demon tribe as his wife and fathered the Sinhalese race.

The Tamils are said to have come into the island later from neighbouring India whose southern state of Tamil Nadu is now home to over 55 million Tamils.

However, Sri Lankan Tamils are distinct from the indentured Tamil labourers imported much later from the subcontinent by the British in the 19th century to work on their plantations and who still sweat on estates.

Before Britain brought the tiny island under a unified system of government in 1815, it had several kingdoms.

Centuries later, peace negotiators are talking about adopting a federal constitution to address Tamil grievances of discrimination and grant them greater autonomy in the island’s northeast where they are in the majority.

With the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) taking up arms in 1972, the island’s Tamil separatist campaign has claimed over 60,000 lives and made the island a basket case in South Asia.

“We considered Sri Lanka a sad story in the past two decades or so,” said US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage during a visit here in August. But President George W. Bush now “dares to dream a future free of war (in Sri Lanka),” he said.

The current peace effort is strongly backed by the United States and led by Norway, neither of which invaded or colonized Sri Lanka in the past.

However, Sri Lanka’s former colonial masters — Britain, the Portuguese and the Dutch — are supportive of Oslo’s attempts to broker peace while neighbouring India also backs a bid to end fighting in its backyard.

At three previous rounds of peace talks, the Colombo government and the rebels have made considerable progress towards a political settlement acceptable to all communities.

However, the government’s chief negotiator G. L. Peiris said a political deal could not be rushed. He has declined to set a timetable for a final deal.

Peace negotiators from both sides are due to travel extensively to examine other systems of government, including those in Canada, Switzerland, South Africa and Indonesia, before writing up a new constitution for Sri Lanka.—AFP