COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s promising peace process hits another milestone on Thursday, pushing along a timetable that has given the island its best chance to end nearly 20 years of war and start rebuilding shattered lives.

As the government and Tamil Tiger rebels mark “D+90” — 90 days since signing a ceasefire in February — they can point to an agreement that has all but stopped the killing and raised hopes for hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

But political analysts say that while the achievements of the Norwegian-brokered process so far were unthinkable just six months ago, the next steps may be even more difficult.

“The peace process has stopped the killing. It has been a massive achievement,” said Rohan Gunaratna, a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

“But they are still at a very early stage. Basically the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government have been going around the peripheral issues. None of the substantive issues have been addressed,” he said.

Those core issues centre around a demand by the Tigers for an independent Tamil state in the north and east, something the Tigers have been fighting for since 1983.

SET AN AGENDA: “Things are going reasonably well, perhaps too fast at the beginning, but some of the really hard issues are still to come,” said Rohan Edirisinghe, a constitutional analyst at the University of Colombo.