BREAKING months of uncertainty, the Sri Lankan government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) announced on August 14 that they would start direct talks. The talks would be held in Thailand between September 12 and 17, with Norwegian facilitation.

Talking to the Tigers has been an oft-travelled road for the Sri Lankan government. The last time such a route was taken - from the last quarter of 1994 to the first quarter of 1995 - during the early days of President Chandrika Kumaratunga's first term in office, the talks collapsed. According to Lakshman Kadirgamar, the former Foreign Minister who is now senior adviser to the President on Foreign Affairs, the talks failed "to a large extent because the two parties were simply not ready to be able to talk to each other face to face. There was too much bitterness and too much distrust at that point of time, so it was doomed - conceptually doomed." Hence the entry of a third party facilitator in the form of Norway, a country outside South Asia's geopolitics and with prior experience at conflict-resolution in other parts of the world.

The mutual distrust, which ran high in 1994-95, clouded all expectations and it was back to war. That war, Eelam War III, steamrolled across northern Sri Lanka for seven years until a change of government, on the one side, and the realisation about the ineffectiveness of wars of attrition on the other, played their roles in bringing the government and the Tigers to agree upon cessation of hostilities in early 2002.

In the more immediate context, the agreement on cessation of hostilities, signed independently by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and LTTE leader V. Prabakaran, with Norwegian facilitation, forms the basis for the next round of talks. During the months after the ceasefire came into effect, there have been visible changes on the Sri Lankan landscape. An air of cautious optimism prevails across the island, where a few years ago abject pessimism was all that one would run into. On the military front, the guns have remained silent, with the tenuous ceasefire holding.

However, doubts continue. Just a few days before the window of dates for the Thailand talks was announced, the Opposition People's Alliance (P.A.) expressed doubts about the possibility of direct parleys being held. The P.A.'s position during the past two months has been two-fold: at the broader level, it welcomes the decision to hold direct talks, but feels that the government is pressured by the LTTE, when it comes to matters of detail. On two important issues - the lifting of the ban on the Tigers and the granting of an interim council - its broad views do not directly clash with those of the government.

However, the P.A.'s nod for these efforts is punctuated by important caveats that can only be ignored to the peril of the peace process. With regard to the grant of an interim administration, the P.A.'s position is that it should not be considered in isolation from ground realities and deeper political issues. The P.A. has said that the grant of an interim administration for the Tigers should be linked to political issues such as democracy and pluralism. On the lifting of the ban, the P.A.'s position has been that it was not opposed to such a move as long as it took forward the attempts at conflict resolution.

Despite this larger understanding between the two parties on the need for a negotiated settlement, several imponderables remain in two areas - the peace process and the bitter bipartisan politics in the south of the country.

On the face of it, the announcement of the dates for talks is a breakthrough that has been arrived at after months of backroom discussions. Despite the expectations often raised over when talks would start, from May it was evident that the Tigers would not be willing to head for the negotiating table until all the deadlines set out in the ceasefire agreement were met. As the final deadline was August 2, it would have been a matter of surprise if the talks had started before that date. Moreover, such a process would have placed more strain on the talks, especially given the volatile situation in the east during the last week of June.

Now that the dates have been announced, the cloud of uncertainty over whether the talks would be held at all has cleared. The next matter of detail will relate to the exact date for the talks to begin. Reports from Thailand indicate that five options have been given to the Sri Lankan government. Current expectations are that once the logistics and the list of people to be present at the ceremonial opening are worked out, a preparatory round will be held to chalk out an agenda for the talks.

It is from this point onwards that the process is bound to come under greater scrutiny and face more challenges. The agenda is one area where there has been a divergence of opinion between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE.

To begin with, the Tigers had taken the position that the talks in Thailand would focus on interim administration and that the other issues could be worked out subsequently. This position ran into rough weather in southern Sri Lanka with President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the P.A. which she heads, calling upon the government to make the Thailand talks as comprehensive as possible. The P.A. said that rather than discussing the interim agenda in isolation, the talks should include important political issues and the core issues of the conflict. One reasoning behind the P.A.'s position was that the ceasefire agreement itself was seen as one giving away too many concessions to the Tigers. Moreover, there are also fears about the marginalisation of Muslims and the non-LTTE Tamil political parties in an LTTE-dominated interim administration.

The government responded to the P.A.'s position by saying that although core issues could also be taken up for discussion, the talks should be structured in such a manner that they were not derailed mid-course. The LTTE, which is keen on "proving Kumaratunga and her supporters wrong", has now said that it is not averse to taking core issues on board at the Thailand talks. Clearly, in the present political context, backing the government led by the United National Party (UNP) gives the Tigers the twin advantages of keeping the territory it gained intact and distancing the southern polity from the P.A.

The way out of this apparent conundrum, according to present indications, is to prolong the talks by sequencing the events in such a way that the sensitive issues do not dominate the talks. The challenge will come when the negotiators open the real issues, including the manner in which the interim administration would relate to the Central government, the position of the existing LTTE cadres and, most important, the question of the Muslims living in the eastern region. The composition of the interim administration itself is set to become an issue that requires sensitive handling.

However, the real uncertainty, which can upset the apple-cart, is to be found in the bipartisan politics in Colombo. With the UNP and the P.A. engaged in a political quarrel over who has the final say in running the government, the fissures within the politics in southern Sri Lanka are bound to have their impact on the talks in Thailand.

For several months now, the President has been facing a hostile Cabinet. Although Sri Lanka's Executive President is easily the most powerful constitutional leader in the region, Kumaratunga has not had an easy task at the helm. The political rivalry between her and Prime Minister Wickremasinghe is only a part, though an important one, of the political polarisation. Deeper still lie several constitutional issues, the important one being the constitutional provision regarding the President's power to dissolve Parliament. Article 70 (1) of the Constitution gives the President the powers to summon, prorogue and dissolve Parliament. However, there is one restraining condition: "When a General Election has been held consequent upon a dissolution of Parliament by the President, the President shall not thereafter dissolve Parliament until the expiration of a period of one year from the date of such General Election, unless Parliament by resolution requests the President to dissolve it."

This clause of the 1978 Constitution, brought in by an earlier UNP government, headed by the late J.R. Jayewardene, has come under scrutiny in the past month. The present political storm can be traced to seemingly justifiable apprehensions in the UNP that the President will dissolve Parliament once the one-year restraining deadline is crossed. Kumaratunga's assurance to the Speaker of Parliament that she will not do so has not won over the Opposition, which is demanding a constitutional amendment. The President, in a two-page message to the Speaker on August 20, gave an assurance that she would not dissolve the House. Exercising her right to send messages to Parliament, Kumaratunga said: "I wish to inform the members of the 11th Parliament, and through them the people of Sri Lanka, that I shall not dissolve the present Parliament unless the party which presently commands the confidence of the House loses its majority and an alternative government cannot be formed from among the members of the present Parliament."

Evidently, the President has laid her cards on the table. The P.A. has of late taken the position that it would win over the support of some ruling party MPs and said that a political reconfiguration is in the offing. The government has also made a similar claim, stating that it would win the support of Opposition members for a crucial amendment that it plans to bring in order to provide MPs with a conscience vote. Given the laws that can deprive MPs of their seat if they defy a party whip, this claim remains to be tested on the floor of the House.

The consequences of this game of political one-upmanship can spell disaster for the peace process. Although several possible scenarios are evident, they all would lead to an oft-made statement by the Tigers - that the politics in southern Sri Lanka simply will not permit space for a meaningful resolution of the conflict. One possible result of the re-configuration of the numbers in Parliament is that the larger sense of disenchantment with the political players among the electorate will strengthen parties such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which is known to have a less rigid position on conflict resolution. On the other hand, there is the possibility of a re-configuration of the Tamil MPs as well. Some political analysts do not rule out even the entry of the LTTE into Parliament. "The Tigers can simply ask some of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MPs to resign and take their places," a political observer noted. This will mean that Parliament will have to face head on the most sensitive national problem the state has confronted since Independence.