OMANTHAI (Sri Lanka), April 9: Led by saffron-robed Buddhist monks and a truck adorned with pictures of doves, a peace marathon crossed into rebel-held territory in Sri Lanka on Tuesday in support of a Norwegian-brokered peace bid.
The marathon started in Colombo and will end in northern Jaffna peninsula on Wednesday (today), tracing a route known a few years ago as “the highway of death”.
Many of the runners were majority Sinhalese eager to send a message to a Tamil minority for whom the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam want an independent state in the north and east.
“We have had an amazing response from the people along the way,” said Senior Superintendent of Police Lucky Peiris, who organized the marathon.
“We could have had thousands of people run but the logistics would have been too difficult,” said Peiris.
When he crossed into the rebel-controlled Wanni region, Peiris became the most senior police officer in 20 years to visit the area.
He was accompanied by 17 cyclists with flowers on their bicycles and 69 runners dressed in white including one carrying what Peiris called “the peace torch”. They were followed by a stream of buses and trucks filled with supporters.
The runners included one foreigner, Briton Chris Stewart who is helping train Sri Lankan athletes for the Asian games later this year.
“It has been very good, people responded tremendously to us,” said Stewart, who has twice finished third in the New York marathon.
The runners entered rebel territory on the eve of a news conference by rebel leader Vellupilai Prabhakaran at Kilinochchi in northern Wanni.
The news conference, Prabhakaran’s first media event in more than a decade, will spell out his stance for direct talks with the government in Thailand next month.
The face-to-face negotiations will be the first in seven years. Four previous peace bids ended in renewed bloodshed.
The runners will spend the night in the Wanni - a tract of jungle that straddles northern Sri Lanka — before proceeding along the A-9 road to Jaffna.—Reuters