By IANS
Chennai : An academic and rights activist from Germany has urged the European Union to put pressure on Sri Lanka to embrace the peace process again.
“The EU should enforce peace in Sri Lanka, force the government to talk peace,” Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam told IANS on the sidelines of a conference here.
She said the breakdown of the Norway-sponsored ceasefire agreement on Sri Lanka had created “a very intricate situation” in the island’s north.
“I think the times ahead will be very bad, very bloody. You cannot eradicate Tamil resistance,” she added, referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
“One can only hope that when the next ceasefire happens, it will last for a decade,” she said.
A professor of history, Helmann-Rajanayagam along with Sri Lanka’s Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP M.K. Sivajilingam and Ranath Kumarasinghe of the Nava Sama Samaj Party (NSSP) took part in a conference organised by Manitham, a rights body based in Tamil Nadu.
Hellmann-Rajanayagam, who has frequently visited the LTTE-held areas in Sri Lanka, said she had just wanted to remain just an academic and an historian.
“But every time I went to Sri Lanka to visit relatives and friends in Kilinochchi, I realised I could not remain a spectator to the rights violations by the authorities,” she said.
The European Union along with Norway, the US and Japan had been overseeing the implementation of the 2002 ceasefire agreement. Colombo has jettisoned the pact.