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Panel to finalise report on Sri Lanka devolution
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Chennai: The head of Sri Lanka’s All-Party Representative Committee, which has been asked by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to come up with a viable devolution proposal to resolve the country’s ethnic conflict, said on Thursday that the committee’s report would be finalised shortly, as there was a common position on 90% of the issues. The island nation’s minister for science and technology , Tissa Vitharana, who is also APRC’s chairman, said the panel would recommend a power-sharing arrangement both at the centre and the periphery , with the country getting a bi-cameral Parliament, one of them being a chamber to give equal representation to all nine provinces. “Hopefully, in the next few months, we will come out with a proposal that will satisfy the needs of all communities,” Vitharana said, addressing a meeting organised by the Centre for Security Analysis here. He was hopeful that the main opposition United National Party, which had earlier walked out of the committee, would join it after its representative had a dialogue with him on the issues already agreed upon. However, he had no such hope with regard to the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), a left-wing Sinhala nationalist party. Vitharana said the Tamil National Alliance, a 22-member Tamil group that had not been invited to the APRC because it was considered a proxy for the LTTE, could also join the panel once there was a consensus among the parties . “It will be a set of proposals that will win over the Tamil people in Sri Lanka as well as the diaspora.” He also said all parties had agreed that the province would be the unit of devolution , and that there should be a clear separation of powers between the centre and the provinces without a concurrent list. Any legislation would have to be vetted by the second chamber, while a two-thirds majority in a combined sitting would be needed to pass any law that would involve a change in the powers devolved to the provinces. Later, talking to TOI, Vitharana said it was wrong to doubt the APRC’s credibility merely because the government was on a military offensive . It was following a dual approach to weaken the LTTE militarily on the one hand, while pursuing a political solution through the APRC process.