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By V.S. Sambandan
COLOMBO. Jan. 31. The draft Constitution proposed by the Sri Lankan President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, "will be one of the starting points'' for arriving at a political solution through negotiations with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, said today. Replying to a debate in Parliament on the peace process, Mr. Wickremesinghe said the two main political parties had several areas of agreement on the draft constitutional proposals that were prepared during the previous regime and that these would not be excluded from the attempt to find a solution. "There are many areas we have agreed upon. The work we have done cannot be rejected'', he said. Urging political parties "not to miss the opportunity'' presented by the latest peace process, Mr. Wickremesinghe said "there will be no second bus to come by''. On the sensitive issue of resettlement in the northern High Security Zones (HSZs), he said the report of the first U.N. peacekeeping forces commander, Satish Nambiar, was expected. ``There is no report at the moment,'' he said. Lt. Gen. Nambiar, who was invited in his personal capacity by Mr. Wickremesinghe, is expected in Sri Lanka shortly. The Government had recently declined to comment on media reports on the ground that it would not ``speculate on speculations''. Concluding the debate, the head of Colombo's negotiating team, G.L. Peiris, said the Government "was not bending over backwards'' to meet the LTTE's demands. The present talks were a "genuine negotiating process''. Refuting Opposition charges, he said there was "no clandestine agreement'' between the ruling United National Front and the LTTE. "The whole essence of the peace process is the convergence of people from the (Tamil-majority) north with the people from the (Sinhalese-majority) South'', he said. Participating in the debate on Thursday, another Government negotiator, Milinda Moragoda, who has been briefing India on the progress of the peace talks, said that as the levels of mistrust between the two sides were yet to be reduced, it would be "naive'' to expect the LTTE to disarm its cadres or de-commission its weapons.
`Muslims part of the solution'
Rauf Hakeem, another Government representative at the talks, called for a change in approach so that Muslims were seen as a part of the solution. Calling for an attitudinal change, Mr. Hakeem, who heads the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, said in the past, "every peace effort was seen as an attempt to marginalise the Muslims''. Such an approach, he cautioned, would aggravate the ``convulsions'' in the Muslim polity. "The time has come to bury the hatchet and carry on'', he said adding that all efforts should be taken "to save the country from being pushed to violence''. The two-day debate, just ahead of next month's talks, which was shifted from Thailand, has been reduced to two days. In the last round of talks, differences of opinion were made public for the first time when the LTTE pulled out of a sub-committee on de-escalation and normalisation after refusing an Army proposal that linked rebel disarming to resettlement of civilians in the northern High Security Zones.
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