It may seem that peace has come to Sri Lanka with remarkable speed. It is only two months since the government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe was elected with a convincing mandate from the voters to end almost 20 years of a civil war which has cost over 60,000 lives. Yet this Friday, both the government in Colombo and the leaders of the Tamil rebels put their names to a permanent cessation of hostilities, which is due to start today.
Much can still go wrong. Elements in the Sri Lankan armed forces still believe, against all the evidence, that a military victory remains possible. They have their counterparts on the Tamil side, hard-liners who can conceive of nothing but war. The naval engagement that broke out between the two sides in the hours before the peace deal was signed is proof enough of the dangers that still lie on either side of the path of peace.
Nevertheless, at this historic moment, it is the peacemakers who are in the ascendancy. How they reached this position owes much to the faith and patience of a disinterested outside third party. The Norwegian government has played a major role, working over the past two years with both sides, at times when peace hardly seemed less likely. Gradually it has won the trust of virtually all the leading individual players. It then set out to identify the smallest areas on which both sides could agree. Gradually, cautiously, it used agreement in one area as the start for negotiations in another.
Norway’s was not like so many other third-party interventions. When the Americans or a former European colonial power sets out to bring a conflict to an end, they seek to first lay out the agenda which they believe should be followed. The rival sides are bullied, bribed and cajoled, first to the negotiating table and then to the acceptance of a deal, which has very often been drawn up by the so-called peacemaker. Political settlements made in this manner can and do stick but the fact that they have been imposed means they also carry a weakness.
The Norwegian approach has been very different. Oslo’s negotiators have teased out every lead for peace, however small and seemingly insignificant. They have then spun the resulting threads together and with them woven a deal recognizable and acceptable to both sides. What has been achieved in Sri Lanka has been based at every stage upon points of agreement recognized and willingly embraced by each warring party. The resulting deal is virtually without Norwegian fingerprints at all. All that Oslo has done is play the honest broker, with absolutely no ax of its own to grind. Now it is up to both communities in Sri Lanka to make the peace deal stick and to work toward a wider and lasting settlement of their differences. Now also seems to be the time for the rest of the international community to step forward with financial and technical assistance to help the economy get back on its feet.
There will almost certainly be difficult times ahead. Hopefully, Norwegian peacemakers will be able to defuse troubles before they explode. Like the best bomb disposal operators, and unlike the Americans, Norway’s diplomats can be expected to operate without fuss, without self-interest and, most significantly, without noise.
