External Affairs Minister S M Krishna who is on a four-day visit to Sri Lanka is scheduled to visit Jaffna, in Northern Sri Lanka today. He will be the first Indian Foreign Minister in last two decades to visit Jaffna, which is considered to be the cultural and commercial stronghold of the Tamils.
Krishna is likely to open the Indian consulate in Jaffna and inaugurate work on the Northern Railway Line in Srilanka.
On Friday, a Credit Agreement for $416 million for the construction of the Northern Railway line was signed between India and Sri Lanka in the presence of the Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Besides handing over 500 tractors to the war displaced Tamil civilians, Krishna will participate in the ground breaking ceremony to mark the commencement of the pilot project of constructing 1,000 houses for the war displaced Tamil civilians, to be built with Indian help.
This is part of the project for construction of 50,000 houses by India for Internally Displaced Persons in the Northern and Eastern Provinces in Srilanka and also for estate workers in the Central Provinces. Addressing the media, he said those houses would be an enduring symbol of India-Sri Lanka partnership.
In another development, Rajapaksa on Friday met a 16-member delegation of the Tamil Political Parties Forum (TPPF) comprising representatives from most Tamil political parties in Sri lanka, other than the members of the Tamil National Alliance, to discuss post-conflict reconciliation.
Krishna had earlier said that India hoped for a ‘structured dialogue mechanism’ which could lead to a political solution to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
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