Cooperate to find political solution

THE UNP's pledge to help the Government in the task of resolving the ethnic conflict is both relieving and encouraging. This amounts to going against the thus far entrenched, self-destructive trend of the national Opposition continuously resorting to opportunistic politics in the hope of making some short-term gains at the cost of the Government.

Accordingly, inasmuch as we welcome the UNP's promise of cooperation, the likelihood is great of the people welcoming the UNP's present stance.

Hopefully, the UNP's shunning of partisan, petty politics in the context of the National Question would have a positive impact on the overall politics of this country and set a refreshing, new trend wherein all political parties and forces would submerge partisan, short-term interests in the name of the national good.

It should be noted that President Mahinda Rajapaksa laid the foundation for a change of attitude on the part of the Opposition by initially coopting all relevant political parties and forces of Southern Sri Lanka into the All Party Conference, whose aim it is to evolve a Southern consensus on the National Question.

Such initiatives have created a conducive environment for inter-party cooperation on national issues. We hope this cooperative attitude on the part of the Opposition would prove permanent. For far too long political parties of Southern Sri Lanka have used the ethnic conflict to gain political mileage for themselves.

Time and again this suicidal approach has led to the drastic undermining of efforts aimed at resolving our conflict by political means.

One of the latest sabotage attempts of this kind was the hostile reception accorded in Parliament by the then Opposition to the year 2000 draft constitution. Two other examples of note were the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact of the late fifties and Dudley-Chelvanayakam pact of the early sixties.

Therefore, any change to this degrading culture of political opportunism needs to be joyfully welcomed and we consider the UNP's present stance a highly encouraging one. We hope the trend would catch on and that more and more political actors would consider the national interest to be of supreme importance.

From now on, Sri Lanka needs to steadily forge ahead towards a political solution to our conflict, which would be fair by all our communities.

The national interest must be staunchly defended by the State's law enforcers while the country's political parties and forces exert themselves in this direction.

The LTTE should never be encouraged in the belief that it could hold the country to ransom through the unleashing of terror. They need to be reminded that they would be rigorously brought to justice in the event they continue in this delusion.

However, the South needs to realise that a weak-kneed approach to finding a just and honourable solution to the conflict would prove counter - productive.

Trust - in negotiations

In any event, the discussion between the parties may be expected to be long and marked by heated charges and counter charges and sometimes by belligerence. On the other hand, climactic incidents may occur rapidly and one party may stage a walkout.

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