Lanka looks within for peace
17 May 2012 4:13 AM GMT
Sri Lanka will achieve lasting peace only through 'home grown solutions', not those prescribed by the international community, foreign minister G L Peiris has said.
Peiris was speaking Tuesday with key US Senate leaders and also gave a talk on Sri Lanka's post-conflict redevelopment and reconciliation programmes.
Nearly three years to the day that Sri Lanka crushed the Tamil Tigers, Peiris highlighted Sri Lanka's accomplishments at a Washington think-tank, the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars.
'We realize that the (political) process that we have in mind must be a domestic process,' a Sri Lankan embassy statement here quoted him as saying.
'It can't be donor-driven or foreign-owned. That will be unhelpful in implementing the reforms that are required at this moment in history. 'At the end of the day, the solution that everyone wants has got to have a home-grown element to it.'
Peiris said Sri Lanka's immediate goal after the conflict was the resettlement of those displaced by the fighting and economic development to provide livelihood and new infrastructure to the island's north.
The north, he pointed out, was 'devastated by the atrocities of the LTTE'.
Peiris was speaking Tuesday with key US Senate leaders and also gave a talk on Sri Lanka's post-conflict redevelopment and reconciliation programmes.
Nearly three years to the day that Sri Lanka crushed the Tamil Tigers, Peiris highlighted Sri Lanka's accomplishments at a Washington think-tank, the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars.
'We realize that the (political) process that we have in mind must be a domestic process,' a Sri Lankan embassy statement here quoted him as saying.
'It can't be donor-driven or foreign-owned. That will be unhelpful in implementing the reforms that are required at this moment in history. 'At the end of the day, the solution that everyone wants has got to have a home-grown element to it.'
Peiris said Sri Lanka's immediate goal after the conflict was the resettlement of those displaced by the fighting and economic development to provide livelihood and new infrastructure to the island's north.
The north, he pointed out, was 'devastated by the atrocities of the LTTE'.
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