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Epochal visit

After twenty long years, the battle-scarred people of Jaffna will enjoy the relief of seeing a top political leader from Southern Sri Lanka when Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe sets foot on Northern soil today. This is truly an epochal visit, for, it is being undertaken amid unprecedented efforts to bring peace to Sri Lanka.

It is occurring in the most propitious of circumstances because the blood-letting in the island, which earned for it the unflattering label of the "Killing Fields of South Asia", has now been halted on the basis of an agreement which has been accepted by both the Lankan Government and the LTTE.

Peace prospects have never been so bright since the armed conflict erupted twenty years ago and it is only right that the principal architect of the current peace effort, Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe, visits the people of the North, to enable the latter to experience at first hand his abundant good will towards them.

Besides establishing the bona fides of the Government, this visit is bound to raise the morale of the people of the North. The lack of personal, caring gestures by Southern political leaders towards the people of the North, has been a glaring lacuna in past peace efforts and the Premier's personal presence in the North is bound to help greatly in building bridges of trust and amity between the Southern political leadership and the Tamil-speaking people.

The people of the North need to know very badly that there are top decision-makers in the South who genuinely and personally care for them and the Premier's visit is likely to convey this message to them very cogently.

For the best part of twenty years, Southern government leaders have been only a printed name in a newspaper or a document, for the majority of the people of the North-East. This led to increasing alienation between the people of the North-East and the Government of Sri Lanka. Such impersonal governance, coupled with a complete breakdown of communication and interaction between the people of the North and South, bred suspicion and distrust in intercommunal relations. Significant sections of people in the same country did not know each other for years. However, a war was waged, incurring staggering costs, based on presuppositions by both sides to the conflict, which are yet to be verified in full.

It is our hope that the Premier's visits to the one-time war zone would eventually lead to a dissolving of communication barriers between the people of the North and South.

People-to-people contact is the key to improved inter-communal ties. This is a long process but it has to be undertaken if the marginalized people of the North-East are to be brought into the national fold once again and made to feel at home in Sri Lanka.

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