COLOMBO, Aug 23: Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s party on Saturday launched a scathing attack against Norway and Japan over her country’s peace bid and accused her cohabitation government of abdicating its powers to foreigners.

The president’s international affairs adviser, Lakshman Kadirgamar, said Norway, originally invited by Chandrika Kumaratunga to broker peace here, had gone beyond its mandate and was dictating terms to the government.

Mr Kadirgamar told a dinner meeting of the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of Sri Lanka that the recent involvement of Japan in the peace bid had prompted Indian concern over Tokyo’s political role in the region.

“There are too many players and sometimes they are getting in the way of each other,” Mr Kadirgamar said, adding that Tamil Tiger rebels were nonetheless unimpressed and unconcerned about the foreign involvement.

“What we have today is a government that is abdicating its central decision making to foreign powers,” he said.

Mr Kadirgamar, 71, is a former foreign minister who was a key player in the previous government’s drive to lobby foreign governments to ban the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe revived the Oslo-backed peace bid after winning parliamentary elections in Dec 2001.

The premier has raised the level of foreign involvement in the peace process and has often spoken of an “international safety net” in case the Tigers revert to war.

The president’s initiative has remained on hold since April 2001 and she has been an ardent critic of Wickremesinghe’s handling of the peace process.

Kadirgamar said he could not understand what the “safety net” meant and was convinced the Tigers were not worried about international opinion.

“It is a fatal mistake to assume that the LTTE is afraid of anyone,” Kadirgamar said.

He said the LTTE’s boycott of a crucial aid pledging conference hosted by Japan in June was an “eye opener.”

Mr Kadirgamar argued that the Tigers stayed away from Tokyo for fears of having to commit themselves to human rights and freeing child soldiers as demanded by the international community in exchange for reconstruction aid.

He said the guerillas were strengthening themselves militarily thanks to a Norwegian-brokered truce that went into effect on Feb 23 last year while the government was totally unprepared to meet any eventuality.

The rebels were set to gain through the peace process what they could not win after decades of fighting with government forces, he said, warning the Tigers would be threatening economic and strategic security interests of India by building up forces in the north-eastern port district of Trincomalee. Sri Lanka recently leased an oil storage facility in Trincomalee to the Indian Oil Company.—AFP