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COLOMBO: It took a devastating tsunami to finally give the Sri Lankan government and its feared Tamil Tiger foes a common goal after two decades of bloody civil war - and now the clean-up may hold the key to elusive lasting peace.
Constant bickering between the two sides reached fever pitch in the run-up to Sri Lanka's worst natural disaster, the rebels threatening to end a three-year truce and resume a war that has already killed 64,000 people and choked the nation's economy.
But the calamity that killed more than 38,000 people across the Indian Ocean island on Dec 26 has given Norwegian mediators a window of opportunity to draw both sides together at a new round of talks this weekend.
Norwegian peace mediators say talks with reclusive rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran on Saturday will focus on tsunami reconstruction, and not the long-stalled peace talks and rebel demands for self-rule. But the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will also use Saturday's meeting with Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan Petersen and peace envoy Erik Solheim to urge confidence-building measures and seek guarantees they will get a share of pledged donor aid.
"First of all, we will focus on the humanitarian issues and then we will see how talks develop to the next phase (of peace talks)," said S. Puleedevan, secretary-general of the Tigers' peace secretariat.
"We are really concerned about how we are going to do the resettlement and reconstruction," he added. "We don't want to see all the funds going to the Sri Lankan government coffers and nothing happening in the northeast."
The Tigers, who control the northeast, are running their own camps for thousands of displaced families with the help of local and international aid groups, but years of civil war have ravaged infrastructure in the region.
On Wednesday, the Sri Lankan government launched reconstruction in the devastated town of Hambantota, on the stricken southern coast, and said it was part of an ambitious $3.5 billion programme. But few details have emerged and government officials could not say whether any of the money would go to rebel areas.
TENSIONS SIMMER: In addition, the Tigers are furious that the government blocked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan from visiting their territory during a post-tsunami tour earlier this month.
And they angrily reject UNICEF reports that their cadres are recruiting children from camps for tsunami-displaced as child soldiers. But the Tigers, whom the United States has put on a list of banned terror groups alongside the likes of Al Qaeda, are now focusing on cleaning up dozens of decimated coastal villages in their north eastern stronghold.
Analysts warn that neglecting the rebels' central demands for autonomy in the wake of the tsunami could be fatal. "One should not allow the Tamils to feel the peace process has been pushed to the background," said S. Balakrishnan, co-founder of a non-partisan peace advisory group, the National Peace Council.
"The Norwegians' prime responsibility is to sustain the peace process," he added, saying President Chandrika Kumaratunga's government had wasted a "golden opportunity" to reach out to the Tamil people when it blocked Annan from visiting the north east.
Peace envoy Solheim has visited Sri Lanka 18 times since the 2002 cease fire, and said talks were at a "critical" low after his last mediation in mid-December.
The Tigers want the right to govern what they regard as their homeland of Tamil Eelam to be enshrined in the constitution and encompass the government-held Jaffna peninsula, which they regard as the cradle of their civilization. -Reuters
