US, India looking forward to ‘indigenous leadership’ in the North
July 21, 2011 10:40 am
The United States and India are looking forward to the provincial council elections up in the north so that there will be, for the first time, an indigenous leadership in that area that was ruled by the LTTE for 30 years, a senior official of the US State Department said.
‘Where we and the Indians are pushing for progress is on this whole process of reconciliation, where – which is – includes a wide variety of different issues. They need to complete the resettlement process. They need to set up a process of providing for plant dispute resolution, because again, many people have claims to various parts of those plants. They need to stop the activities of paramilitaries that continue to operate in that part of the country,’ he added.
Speaking to reporters the State Dept official stated that, “There’s 70,000 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka that are still in Tamil Nadu. The state and the central government are very happy to be supporting that. There’s no pressure to leave or anything like that. I think some of them have started to slowly trickle back to Sri Lanka, now that the situation is slowly improving. One of the concerns here in Tamil Nadu is always about the IDPs. As you recall, there were almost 300,000 IDPs at the very end of the war. Almost all of those have now been resettled in the north. There’s about 10,000 or so that still need to be resettled, but generally, I think the government’s record on that has been good.”