Persist with peace effort

Once again, President Kumaratunga has emphatically underlined her commitment to forging ahead with the peace process and the country could take heart from this vital pronouncement. The President was quoted telling a 'Gami Pubudu' gathering in Matale that the Government couldn't fold up the peace effort, as some previous governments did, "in the face of opposition by a handful of extremists."

The peace effort has - of course - come across many an obstacle but on the determination and courage of the political leadership of the country to persist with it, depends its success and we are glad that the President is not flinching from carrying out this historic task. There is no getting away from the fact that Sri Lanka is a home for all its communities and if there is to be peace and reconciliation in this country, the rights of all our ethnic groups should be met within a united and geographically whole Sri Lanka.

If we begin with the premise that Sri Lanka is a multiethnic, multireligious and plural society, then, it stands to reason that the essential needs and rights of these groups should be provided for on the basis of a constitutional structure which is responsive to these legitimate aspirations. If not, Sri Lanka cannot lay claim to being a single, united nation.

It stands to the credit of President Kumaratunga that she has kept these issues alive and has placed ethnic peace on top of the national agenda. Unfortunately, not all sections of the Lankan polity have been supportive of her endeavours.

Some of these dissidents are lost in a miasma of racial and religious bigotry, even going to the extent of claiming that the majority community should exercise an unchallenged hegemony in all public spheres.

It need hardly be said that such positions are a recipe for continued national strife and eventual national ruin. Such dissidents seem to be blind to the glaring reality that a polity which provides for the realisation of the legitimate aspirations of all our communities is the best recipe for national survival. In other words, we need to launch a quality democracy.

We urge the Government to continue with the search for ethnic peace. Even the P-TOMS should be vibrantly persisted with, by rectifying its limitations and modifying it in accordance with the recent Supreme Court ruling. In other words, the State needs to continuously overcome the obstacles standing before it and ethnic peace. Likewise, it needs to educate the silent but moral majority on these issues and get them on to the State's side.