NEW DELHI, 8 May 2006 — Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera arrived here yesterday to apprise Indian leaders of the situation in the island nation and hoping to persuade New Delhi to help broker peace. He is accompanied by the country’s foreign and finance secretaries.
Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna has described Samaraweera’s visit “timely” and “important” as “the peace process is delicately poised in Sri Lanka.”
During his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who also holds the Foreign Ministry portfolio, Samaraweera will outline the situation in Sri Lanka in detail. He will also be meeting Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and leader of the opposition in Rajya Sabha Jaswant Singh.
India, which has had a long and complex involvement in Sri Lanka, has supported efforts to end the civil war, which killed 64,000 people over two decades until the 2002 truce.
New Delhi sent peacekeeping troops to Sri Lanka’s Tamil-held areas in the mid-1980s, got locked in open war with the rebels and was forced to pull out.
More than 1,000 Indian soldiers were killed during that effort. India declared the LTTE a terrorist outfit after the assassination of its former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, blamed on the LTTE, and has ever since kept away from the conflict. Rajiv’s Italian-born widow Sonia heads the ruling Congress party and although New Delhi continues to deeply dislike the Tamil Tigers, the compulsions of coalition politics prevent it from helping Colombo, analysts said.
The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, across the Palk Strait from Sri Lanka, is home to about 60 million Indian Tamils and the ethnic conflict on the other side of the seas has been an extremely emotive issue in the region.
— Additional input from Reuters
