Sri Lanka’s External Affairs Minister GL Peiris who arrived in New Delhi on Sunday is scheduled to hand-deliver a personal invitation to Dr Manmohan Singh to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Colombo in November.
Mr Peiris said Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse deputed him to Delhi to convey the hope that India will be represented at the highest level” for the summit.
In March, the regional powerhouse DMK quit Dr Singh’s coalition. Leaders of the Tamil Nadu party said that at a session of the UN on human rights in Geneva, India had failed to indict Sri Lanka of “genocide.”
“India is by far the largest country by population in the Commonwealth. Its participation at the highest level is desirable since the Commonwealth Summit is being held in Asia after a quarter of a century,” the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister said.
An unusually assertive Mr Peiris, in fact, listed out the achievements of the Rajapakse government in rebuilding lives and infrastructure in the war-ravaged Northern Province. Local elections in the area are due in the last week of September.
“When we started the rehabilitation process, we had to prioritise our focus areas. In these four years, we had massive work. Nowhere in the world has so much been done in such a short time in such conditions,” the foreign minister pointed out.
The External Affairs Minister, however, made known his government’s resentment against what he called “excessive interest and intervention from outside” in the internal affairs of Sri Lanka. He blamed the Tamil diaspora for the pressure that some countries seek to apply on Colombo. “The Tamil diaspora has not given up on its dream of ‘Eelam’ (a separate state) and despite the LTTE’s military defeat, the diaspora is using its financial clout to try and isolate Sri Lanka,” Mr Peiris charged. “Human Rights have become a political tool in the hands of some,” he added.
Peiris made it clear that Sri Lanka will not accept any outside solution to the Tamil issue. In deciding their own future, the local Tamils need to be in the driving seat, not any one from outside,” Mr Peiris emphasized, NDTV reports.
