gulf news,  Sat Feb 18 21:28:05 EST 2006

    Colombo: Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse wants to make transparent the talks with Tamil rebels in Geneva this week.

He will set up an operations room in his official residence so that his coalition partners, the marxists and the Buddhist monks, can witness 'live' the negotiations between government negotiators and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) at resumed peace talks.

There will be telephone hook-ups to the Sri Lanka delegation as well, so that last-minute advice can be passed on, a source at the Presidential Secretariat said, amid fears that the inexperienced official delegation may not be able to Full Story


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- The Academic

Why not send an experienced delegation then?  May be they should have sent the people who are going to man the control room in Colombo!  What a farce.

Is MR lost his marbles?
Is he treating this as a circus?
He should have taken the training from a sri lankan teacher insted of Harvard experts.
god helps MR and srilanka

The delegation represents tamils, muslims and sinhala people in Sri Lanka. So, LTTE can not address issues for only one ethnic group. It has to be every body.

But those different ethnic groups also represent GOSL.

nirupama_Subramaniam wrote:

Why not send an experienced delegation then?  May be they should have sent the people who are going to man the control room in Colombo!  What a farce.

Nirupama,

There are several reasons:

1. The Government delagation has not been working full time on this. They had other work to do in a democratic framework. whereas this has been the fulltime work of the LTTE.

2. The Government is a democratically elected team. LTTE is an autocratic group. Therefore, the mindsets of the LTTE is alien to those who have lived in a democratic framework.

3. LTTE has cheated many many times starting from Thimpu talks. All those leaders of the south who looked at this problem with some humane attitude were either killed or cheated. So, there is a reason to be careful.

We should be glad that  this step is taken so that those parties who cannot participate in talks can see what is happening.
If not it will be hear say, and reports twisted by the media for petty gains.
Just like what is stated here about “inexperienced official delegation” and we pick those. Then it becomes a great thrill to those mentally sick reporters.


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MAC

I do not believe that the public is going to be able to view the negotiations. To characterize the arrangements for consultations with the coaltion partners in Sri Lanka as transparent is not accurate.  The whole thing is a private matter between members of the coalition government. I would like to see full transparency when the Government negotiates oil and other concessions, privatization schemes and sale of public land to foreign companies. The negotiations with LTTE can be embarassing when you see the  Norwegians showing the dark participants where to sit and hovering around them as child carers. Abanayake of the Sunday Obeserver is right when he says in his column why not outsource the negotiations to the Norwegians.

AMICUS wrote:

I do not believe that the public is going to be able to view the negotiations. To characterize the arrangements for consultations with the coaltion partners in Sri Lanka as transparent is not accurate.  The whole thing is a private matter between members of the coalition government. I would like to see full transparency when the Government negotiates oil and other concessions, privatization schemes and sale of public land to foreign companies.

Transparency will not happen when you consider direct gain of money for involved parties in privatisation etc..

P-TOMS is a good example when many in Government wanted the money to be given without adequate measures for auditing. When donors demanded accoutabiity they rejected it using the court system. So the message is "we get all or nothing for anyone", tsunami affected are the least priority.