POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Top Peace-builder Plans Ambitious Peace March

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Sep 6 1999 (IPS) - Tudor Ariyaratne, Sri Lanka’s best-known peace builder, is determined to succeed.

He wants to take a million-strong peace march into Tamil rebel-territory in the north to urge the rebels and government troops to lay down their arms and end the 16-year civil war.

A friend of prominent rights activist and parliamentarian, Neelan Tiruchelvam, who was assassinated in July, Ariyaratne has been leading small peace meetings in Colombo, and elsewhere.

“I want to prevail upon the goodness of these people. We can’t win wars by fighting. We should have peace in our minds to seek solutions,” the diminutive peace worker and founder in 1958 of Sri Lanka’s biggest grassroots group, Sarvodaya, said in an interview.

Admired here and abroad — the recipient of many international peace awards — he wants to invite former U.S president Jimmy Carter, Coretta King, the Dalai Lama, Yasser Arafat among others to participate in the march tentatively scheduled for February 2000.

“We want to sit down for four hours in the heart of Tamil guerrilla country (in Sri Lanka’s north) and meditate for peace,” said Ariyaratne, who is strongly influenced by Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi.

One month after the killing of Tiruchelvam, leader of a moderate Tamil party, by a suspected Tamil rebel suicide bomber here on Jul. 29, Ariyaratne brought together thousands of people — the largest ever peace gathering in Sri Lanka — in a Colombo park, Aug. 28, to meditate for peace.

Buddhist monks, Muslim, Catholic and Hindu priests joined lay Sri Lankans in prayer, and issued a call for a peaceful end to the island’s protracted ethnic war.

The participants dressed in white had converged from 10,000 villages across the island. Ariyaratne said his intention was to “raise the spiritual consciousness of people and thereby direct their minds towards national unity and ending the terrors of violence and war.”

He said the peace march and prayer gathering had the support of both Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga and opposition United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremasinghe.

Last month, Sri Lankan peace groups issued a call for a three- day ceasefire, Aug. 27 to 29, between government troops and Tamil rebels but both sides did not respond.

“I know calls for a ceasefire were sent to the government and the Tamil Tigers (rebels) through faxes but we did not get a response,” confirms Jehan Perera, secretary of the National Peace Alliance (NAP).

On Aug. 27, the NAP, an alliance of some 100 peace groups, met in Colombo for a peace conference which ended with a resolution urging the government and other political parties to quickly implement the devolution package for peace.

Kumaratunga’s People Alliance (PA) government, which came to power in 1995 promising to end the ethnic conflict, has drafted a peace package which provides for greater autonomy and partly meets the demand for a separate homeland by the Tamil militants.

The constitutional changes were drafted by Tiruchelvam, Sri Lanka’s best constitutional lawyer, among others, but the ruling party has stopped short of presenting the Bill in Parliament where it does not have a two-thirds majority. Before Tiruchelvam’s slaying, the government had promised to table the draft constitution in August.

Sri Lanka’s Centre for Society and Religion launched a signature campaign for peace Aug. 28. It hopes to enlist the support of at least half a million people for an early end to the war which has claimed the lives of some 75,000 people.

The Tamil Tiger rebels who want a homeland, ‘Eelam’, for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil community, claim they represent all Tamils. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict which has been raging since the 1983 anti-Tamil riots.

Ariyaratne organised his first prayer meeting for peace in October that year at which a decision to organise a peace march from Sri Lanka’s south to the north was taken.

On Dec. 1, 1983, joined by 35,000 people from all religious faiths including a group of Indian Sikhs, Ariyaratne walked for 20 km until then President Junius Jayewardene intervened and promised to hold an all-party conference to discuss peace options.

Despite the march being called off, Ariyaratne and a small group of peace activists including five Buddhist monks from Japan continued walking to the northern town of Vavuniya.

Ariyaratne has won awards like the Ramon Magsaysay award for community leadership in 1996, Niwano Peace prize from Japan in 1992, the King Boudouin award for international development in 1982 among other achievements.

A firm believer of non-violence, he said he once shared a platform with Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. “I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when Guevara walked up to me with a smile and hugged me like I was a friend, saying he had always wanted to meet me,” recalls the pacifist peace-maker.