Sri Lanka-LTTE Talks

The last weekend saw a fresh round of talks after a long interval between representatives of the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE in Geneva. The talks had been preceded by so much violence by both sides that it was not clear they would be held. Indeed, whether the Ceasefire Agreement is still in force is a debatable point in view of the killings, air raids and blasts of the last few months. There was no mutually agreed agenda going into the talks, and in the circumstances, having the talks at all should count as the biggest achievement of the mediators.

Laura MacInnis, Agenda hassles dog Sri Lanka peace talks, Reuters, October 28, 2006.
PK Balachandran, Embrace democracy: Lanka to LTTE, Hindustan Times, October 28, 2006.
LTTE welcomes southern consensus, The Nation on Sunday, October 29, 2006.

Predictably, the two sides took patently incompatible positions, and the talks did not suggest the existence of any common ground.

Patricia Nunan, Sri Lanka Rebels Demand Government Reopen Highway, Say Peace Talks at Stake, Voice of America, October 27, 2006.
Amal Jayasinghe, Berlin Wall: Swiss talks failure pushes Sri Lanka to abyss, AFP/ Lanka Business Online, October 30, 2006.

The media reportage and commentary on this is couched in the language of success or failure as zero-sum calculations. Where the holding of talks itself is an achievement, is it possible to expect anything from those talks? Realistic is read as pessimistic, and yet, hope must spring eternal, if such fraught conditions are yet expected to produce anything substantial in two days.

Most Sri Lankan newspapers are not accessible to non-subscribers, so it is not possible to link op-ed pages to this resource. Sources that are easily available online are usually overtly partisan and therefore, useful to researchers in their own way, but not to the general reader.

Some useful information on the Sri Lankan peace process:

Peace Trail: Timeline on Sri Lanka's troubled peace bid, AFP/Lanka Business Online, October 30, 2006.

Subcontinent South, September-October 2006, Part B

The second part of the 'catch-up' issue of Subcontinent South (Volume I, Number 39) focuses on the Maldives.

Maldives: September-October 2006.

Subcontinent South, September-October 2006

It is over a month since Subcontinent South appeared in its original form. In order to 'catch up' on significant developments in this region in the six weeks between September 15 and October 31, 2006, the current issue will be posted in several parts as links to webpages hosted elsewhere.

Part A: Sri Lanka: September-October 2006, posted October 25, 2006.

Introducing Subcontinent South

Attention to South Asia remains largely attention to its large states; India and Pakistan's troubled relationship garners the maximum attention. Subcontinent South is an initiative of Chaitanya-The Policy Consultancy intended to draw attention to news, developments and trends in the southern part of the South Asian subcontinent, which we define as including Sri Lanka, Maldives and India's southern states and island territories.

Started in October 2005, Subcontinent South is not intended to be a comprehensive news resource; instead, we will identify a short list of stories in the course of the week that we consider to be of significance from the point of governance, security and gender. Past issues were prepared in a weekly web-page format and are archived here.