---

Sri Lanka

Our task in the medium term is to try to help people come to terms with history. There is no way of writing up the Sri Lankan issue without pointing fingers one way or another. To the Sri Lankans we can say that we recognise that the Sinhalese and the Tamils share the island and, although there can be only one military Government in the country, there must be space for autonomy in terms of economic, cultural and political development. It is necessary for the Sri Lankan Government to start saying more openly now how they will provide the space for the Tamils to be represented and have their voices heard, to avoid the feelings of second-class citizenship that have inspired much of the past. One of my contemporaries, Rajiv Gandhi, was a victim of this conflict because he sent a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka from India, and that led to his assassination. I pay tribute to him and to the journalists, whether from the Sinhalese elite—such as the editor of The Sunday Leader—or others, who have died because they tried to make information available that some wished to keep obscured. We know, from imprecise parallels with the violence in Gaza, what can be experienced by civilian populations in areas subject to a change in military control. Most of us accept that there will be a change of military control in that north-east corner of Sri Lanka. The Tokyo quartet is right to ask for an immediate ceasefire to allow people to get away from areas of fighting, and to point out to the Tamil Tiger leaders that there is no point in continued military resistance. They should be told not to make the people around them suffer while the transition takes place. I understand the views of most people in this conflict. We cannot do a great deal but in the short term we can aim to save lives and, in the medium term, we can provide the space for some kind of political development so that people can go on trying, however valiantly, imprecisely or unsuccessfully to begin with, to create an island that can contain all the ethnicities that are there.