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Formal cohabitation agreement needed - NPC

President Chandrika Kumaratunga's decree taking away the Development Lotteries Board from the Ministry of Economic Reforms and the Government's resistance to this has thrown the country into crisis. It has distracted the country's decision makers from overcoming the obstacles to the peace process. If this issue is not resolved at an early stage, it is reasonable to believe that there will be a slide towards escalated confrontation that contributes even to the breakdown of the peace talks, the National Peace Council (NPC) states in a media release.

The NPC calls on the President and Prime Minister to work out a formal cohabitation agreement that specifies what each of them is entitled to do and not entitled to do. We advocate third party facilitation that can either be local or foreign in this endeavour. As the efforts to overcome the current deadlock in the peace process show, the presence of a third party facilitator is invaluable when the parties to a conflict are taking up differing positions or are not prepared to directly deal with one another the release adds. It states:

"In particular, an agreement between the President and Prime Minister regarding the peace process is vital to its ultimate success. Such an agreement will give greater reliability and strength to commitments made by the Government. The Government may have been able to proceed at a rapid pace without consulting the President or the Opposition in the first phase of the peace process. But now the limits of this non-consultative and unilateral approach are becoming more evident".

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