Monday, August 14 2006 10:18 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

New Delhi: The international community overseeing Sri Lanka's peace process is blaming both the Government and the Tamil Tigers for the latest fighting in the island that has killed hundreds and displaced thousands.

The co-chairs to the barely alive peace process say they are 'hugely disappointed' with Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse and Tamil Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran for failing to prevent clashes that have the potential to spark full-scale war.

Representatives of the co-chairs, which includes the US, Japan, the European Union and peace facilitator Norway, told sources that they would wait for the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to fight it ou".

"At the moment we cannot do much anyway," said one high-level source, sounding thoroughly disgusted.

"Yes, there is a huge sense of disappointment. The leaderships on both sides have been completely unreasonable," he said. The international community is convinced that there is no military solution to the Sri Lankan conflict that since 1983 has claimed over 65,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands, many within Sri Lanka, parts of which the Tamil Tigers control.

A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire agreement that came into effect in 2002 began to fall apart from December 2005. Fighting over a waterway in eastern Sri Lanka that erupted in July has now spread to other parts of the northeast.

The escalation took place even as Jon Hannsen-Bauer, Norway's special envoy, was touring Sri Lanka. There is no word if Japan's special envoy, Yasuhi Akashi, would visit Sri Lanka this month or if Norway's Erik Solheim, the original peacemaker, would go there to attempt a possible reconciliation.

According to diplomatic sources, the co-chairs would meet at the earliest in Brussels, home to the headquarters of the European Union, to see what they can do. The dominant feeling is they cannot do much unless the Sri Lankan government and LTTE really feel the need for peace, however flawed and tenuous.

The co-chairs are also increasingly convinced that the process cannot proceed beyond a point unless they have easy access to both President Rajapakse and, more important, Prabhakaran, the one man without whose concurrence no peace will ever be possible in Sri Lanka.

The co-chairs, who Saturday issued a statement calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities, say three major factors are responsible for the escalating conflict: the LTTE's provocations, the Sri Lankan military's belligerence including killing of Tamil civilians.

The relentless pressures on the government by the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), the Sinhalese-Marxist party resolutely opposed to the 2002 ceasefire pact and Norway.

Each of the three factors, it is felt, is inter-related and is causing a vicious cycle of violence. The government, the co-chairs explain, can neither do away with Norway or the 2002 truce nor totally displease the JVP, and so finds itself in a bind.

In their Saturday statement, the co-chairs urged both Colombo and the LTTE to make the utmost effort to prevent a further escalation of violence and called the resultant suffering of innocent civilians 'intolerable'.

What is seriously worrying the co-chairs is that the displacement of thousands, mainly Tamil and Muslim civilians, in the northeast following the latest fighting would lead to a major humanitarian crisis. The LTTE and the government are being urged to allow relief agencies to assist victims of all three ethnic groups and to grant access to disputed areas.

The co-chairs are in touch with India, which shares most of the assessment of the international players and which is bracing for intensified refugee movement by the sea to Tamil Nadu by Sri Lankan Tamils.

The only saving grace in Sri Lanka is that neither the government nor the LTTE has formally renounced the ceasefire agreement. That gives the international community the faint opening to keep trying to put the peace process back on track.