Norway reaffirms Lanka peace broker role
The rebels on Thursday aborted a two-day meeting in Oslo with Colombo representatives arranged by Norway to discuss the safety of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) overseeing a fragile truce in the island nation.
"It's not all negative, we stand ready to help both parties in any way to take the peace process forward," Norway's special envoy for the peace process, Jon Hanssen-Bauer, told AFP by telephone from the Norwegian capital.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. The possibility for progress lay however with the parties themselves, Hanssen-Bauer stressed.
"It is up to the two sides to come forward with their own initiatives and ideas," he said.
"Norway will not be taking any new initiatives," Hanssen-Bauer added.
The Scandinavian country, which has been Sri Lanka's peace broker since January 2000, declared the Oslo talks a failure when it could not orchestrate a face-to-face encounter between the two, blaming the Tigers for the breakdown.
Norwegian officials also faulted the European Union for offending the rebels at a sensitive time, by adding the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to its list of terrorist organisations last month.
"The EU decision was taken on the basis of certain criteria about which organisations should be on the list, without taking into consideration the adverse consequences the decision might have for their own member states," the director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO), Stein Toennesson, told AFP.
"The EU is not suited for taking positions on acute political problems. It has long been known that the LTTE, through the Norwegian facilitators, has tried to avoid ending up on the EU terror list," Toennesson said.
The rebels called for the removal of SLMM truce monitors originating from EU states, following the Union's decision.
Norwegian diplomats said the recalling of EU members of the SLMM would reduce the mission to 20 Norwegian and Icelandic peacekeepers, from the current 60, which includes observers from EU states Sweden, Denmark and Finland.