SRI LANKA: Inter-communal talks at local level are needed to help restore the peace process in Sri Lanka, an Irish-born priest closely involved with the situation said during a visit to Dublin at the weekend.
Fr Séamus Finn, a senior member of the Oblate order which has a long history of involvement with the island, said the renewal of hostilities between the Tamil Tigers and the government had created a new wave of refugees.
"Since April, the UN says there are 200,000 new refugees, mostly Tamils, including more than 50,000 women and children wandering around. And for a lot of these families this is probably the third or fourth time they have been displaced like this," he told The Irish Times.
The civil war between the minority Tamil and majority Sinhalese communities on the island has left 65,000 people dead since it began in 1983.
"It has a lot of similarities to the Northern Ireland situation. There are lots of people in the south that want to ignore it and hope it will go away," says Fr Finn.
"It really needs some honest brokers from the outside who can do some of the local-community convening and talking that happened in Northern Ireland."
This, he adds, would be in addition to the formal dialogue that has been taking place in Switzerland between senior representatives of the two sides.
"Can you bring people into a room from both communities and actually get them to talk about the pain that they're carrying, the hurt, the loss; in a zone where they feel there can be trust and they can begin at least some kind of confidence-building measures."
This, he argues, could happen either on the island or abroad.
"I think it happened both ways in Northern Ireland. I'm saying that at the local village or neighbourhood or regional level, there has to be some mechanisms put in place to let people talk about family members and property that they've lost, and injuries they have sustained. It's not a question of what's going on in their head, it's what's going on in their guts and in their heart."
Born in Kanturk, Co Cork, in 1949, Fr Finn is a leading religious activist on social issues in the US and internationally, in his role as director of justice, peace and integrity of creation with the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. In addition to lobbying governments and international institutions, the Oblates also campaign for socially responsible behaviour by multinationals.
The order has "a lot of schools" and its modest investments in employee pension funds in different corporations allows it to have a voice in how these companies are run. The Oblates have monitored the activities of Coca-Cola, Disney, Ford Motor Company, McDonald's and Nike as well as "major pharmaceutical companies on Aids issues".
"We have gone to China with a number of companies to look at the factories where their products are made - shirts, shoes, coats, ties, cameras - and meet with the workers. We're interested in making sure that the products which the companies are selling in the developed world are not produced in sweatshops, there's no forced overtime, there's fair wages," he says.
Commenting on the response from the multinationals, Fr Finn said that "when we started this 30 years ago it was more adversarial". But this had changed and "the good companies" now understood how bad publicity could damage their brand or image.
These companies now realised that "it really is in their best interest to pay attention to some basic core principles of human rights and the environment" and that "it would cost them less to actually do the thing right to begin with or to find a way to do it right".