COLOMBO (AFP) — A peace panel including ruling party politicians told Sri Lanka's president to devolve more power to minority Tamils as a first step to resolving the island's long-running ethnic war, officials said Thursday.
The panel, made up of President Mahinda Rajapakse's Sri Lanka Freedom Party lawmakers and their allies, has been mulling peace options for two years.
The recommendation, however, falls far short of demands by Tamil Tiger rebels for full independence and is nothing new -- devolution is part of existing provisions in the Sri Lankan constitution that have never been put into practice.
"The APRC (All Party Representative Committee) proposals are to address the reasons for the present conflict... and to implement devolution proposals introduced to the constitution in 1987, that were never fully implemented," foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama told reporters.
The minister, however, declined to set a timeframe for devolution.
In 1987, the Sri Lankan government took the decision to share power with minority Tamils in the north and east, but never fully devolved political power.
The Tamil Tigers already control a large part of the island's north and run a de facto separate state -- meaning that in many Tamil areas the president has no power to devolve anyway.
But Bogollagama has briefed foreign diplomats in Colombo about the proposals, which he described as a "historic step."
"The proposals were very well accepted by the diplomatic community and they hoped that it could be implemented very quickly," said Bogollagama.
"The international community must realise that these are not proposals aimed at meeting the demands of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), but to meet the aspirations of the long-suffering people in the north and east."
The president's all-party peace panel has come in for stiff criticism for displaying no sense of urgency and having little or no clout.
The panel got off to a bad start when the island's opposition parties walked out, and the Tamil Tigers were also excluded from the beginning.
Its recommendation comes in the wake of Rajapakse's decision to pull out of a 2002 Norwegian-brokered ceasefire with the Tamil Tigers earlier this month.
This week the president insisted he did not believe in a military solution to the war and wanted a political solution, although at the same time fighting has been escalating in the north with the Sri Lankan army claiming it is killing hundreds of rebels.
The decades-old conflict has left well over 60,000 people dead.
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