13th Amendment to get new lease
of life?

APRC to meet twice a week

Laying more emphasis on the 13th Amendment, Western People’s Front (WPF) Leader Mano Ganeshan yesterday urged Tamil political parties to focus more on the constitutional change. The call comes in the wake of APRC meetings being increased to two a week and Chairman Prof. Tissa Vitharana noting that the 13th Amendment should be implemented in the interim period before a fresh political solution.
Prof. Tissa Vitharana while addressing the Dr. N.M Perera symposium noted that the message being sent by not implementing the 13th Amendment was negative and that it would be more beneficial to implement it while the government took steps to find a more comprehensive political solution. While admitting that the 13th Amendment was impractical in some aspects he nonetheless insisted that it would build confidence and charges of delaying power devolvement would be reduced.
“Formulating a political solution is time consuming. We must accept that. So until that process is ready we must look to what can be done in the meantime. The implementation of the 13th Amendment must be regarded in this light.
Regardless of the Peace Secretariat told to wind down its duties we will continue to meet twice each week from next week. The APRC members have reached a decision regarding all political concerns and it is based on this that we are looking to formulate this latest set of proposals,” he said.
Meanwhile, addressing a press conference Ganeshan called on all parties to seek a political solution to the ethnic question regardless of what the terms were. He strongly impressed the need to look beyond words such as unitary, federal and devolvement to seek a genuine solution that would gain the confidence and respect of the masses.
“We are standing at the crossroads of history and if we don’t get this right now future generations will condemn us for all time. Therefore I urge the parties to look at the 13th Amendment more closely because even though it can have faults it is nonetheless the only legalised part of our constitution that looks at power devolvement and was expressly brought in to facilitate a political solution to the ethnic conflict. So I believe that we must consider the 13th Amendment seriously and look to it as a starting point for further discussions and policy formulations. After all we need something to act as a guide of sorts and to define future proposals against until we find what we are looking for.”

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