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Minister Azwer at UN's NGO meeting : Sri Lankan solution to the Middle East crisis

by our special correspondent

UNITED NATIONS - Addressing a meeting of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at the United Nations, the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Alhaj A. H. M. Azwer offered what he called "a Sri Lankan solution" to the Middle East crisis.

"The earth is bleeding from the centre for the past half a Century, in the form of Palestine. It still continues to bleed. The world shall assume its proper sense and calm shall prevail only when the World Body determinedly takes action to stop this 'heart' from bleeding," he pleaded amidst the world delegates.

Azwer said that since a new government was installed in power last year, Sri Lanka had launched a series of confidence-building measures - one step at a time. The December 5, 2001 General Elections, in fact, turned out to be a confidence building exercise for the forces that unceasingly fought a war for two decades, instantly laid down arms and unilaterally agreed to sit around a table to talk. And talk they did quite successfully in Thailand, with a hope of reaching satisfactory solutions to their vexed problems.

"We have had a Ceasefire Agreement. We have laid down arms. We have had a cessation of hostilities. And we have stopped shooting - and started talking," he told the gathering of the world non-governmental organisations.

The meeting, officially billed 'the International Conference of Civil Society in Support of the Palestinian People', was sponsored by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. Azwer, who as a Sri Lanka delegate to the UN in 1989 created history by interpreting the then Foreign Minister Ranjan Wijeratne's address to the World Assembly into the Sinhala language, said Sri Lanka was also fortunate in having the good offices of Norway as a facilitator in the ongoing peace negotiations.

Asked by Panellists whether Sri Lanka would be willing to play the role of a facilitator between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Azwer said he will carry that message to his Government. "I will take this to the Prime Minister Hon. Ranil Wickremesinghe," he added.

He also told the meeting that all the "pious resolutions" adopted by the General Assembly and the Security Council mean nothing - unless and until they are implemented.

Making a statement to the Security Council, the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan quoted the great Irish poet William Buttler Yeats who describing of a time in his country more than 80 years ago, wrote:

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;

The best lack all conviction,

While the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Responding to this, and, relating also the present scenario in Palestine, Azwer concluded.

"Let us resolve to make UN the Centre

That would hold things together and should fall not apart

Anarchy is driven from the face of the earth

So that the best should not lose all conviction

While the worst fall out of grace."

The United Nations, he said, should assert itself and bring a peaceful resolution to a problem that has lasted over 50 long years.

"The Palestinian people should cease to be refugees and given a homeland of their own. That is their inalienable birthright. The world owes the Palestinians a right to a new nation state," Minister Azwer asserted.

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