More from the mad little island:
Norwegian envoys have met Sri Lanka’s president in an effort to jump-start peace talks with Tamil Tiger rebels.
No details have so far emerged of discussions between the envoys, Erik Solheim and Jon Hannsen-Bauer [sic], and President Mahinda Rajapakse.
The meeting comes amid growing international concern that the island is drifting back into civil war.
Later in the day, Mr Solheim is scheduled to fly to India to brief officials there.
Attempts by Norway to revive peace negotiations, which stalled three years ago following a truce in 2002, have so far been unsuccessful.
The envoys’ latest effort comes amid escalating violence in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
More than 200 people have died in violence over the past month.
BBC News
News bulletins on Sri Lanka have a certain bland and repetetive character: international envoys arrive in ‘bids’ to ‘jump-start peace talks’ in the face of ‘escalating violence’. There is abundant precedent for this.
One is tempted to say: enough is enough. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) are child-recruiting, suicide-bombing terrorists whose moral standing is somewhere between Hamas and the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. The government in Colombo consists of corrupt, craven, and benighted extremists who, to illustrate, just became the first in the world to ban The Da Vinci Code over its alleged blasphemic nature.
Such leadership explains why Sri Lanka ranks as the 25th most failed state in the world, between Rwanda and Ethiopia. Though the country is utterly impoverished by two decades of civil war and dependent on foreign aid, its overall rate of absorption of such aid is a humble 20 percent, according to the Institute of Policy Studies. The utilization rate of tsunami aid, according to the US Auditor General’s Office, is 13.5 percent. Think about it: in Aceh, the tsunami ended the war, whereas Lanka couldn’t even agree on how to distribute the aid! Indeed, five weeks after the disaster only 30 percent of the affected in government-controlled areas — to say nothing of the rest — had received any assistance whatsoever.
If there is a silver lining to the new flare of civil war, it is that the $4.5 billion in aid that international donors — the EU, the US, Japan, and Norway — have made conditional on peace may soon be put to better use elsewhere than on dysfunctional and perhaps forever hopeless Sri Lanka.
