Sri Lanka’s proposal to the Commonwealth to hold a terrorism conference in Colombo is still in the balance.
Although Commonwealth leaders have endorsed the idea in principle, it was decided in New York to call a meeting of the Commonwealth Committee on Terrorism (CCT) to decide whether such a conference should be held and if so what its modalities should be.Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma, speaking exclusively to The Sunday Times in London on Thursday said the 10- member Commonwealth Committee on Terrorism would meet in London in the next couple of months to decide on follow-up action on the proposal and what shape it should take if at all.
“The committee will meet at officials-level. It is chaired by Australia and Sri Lanka is a member of it,” Mr. Sharma said. “If a conference is to be held we must have an idea of what it is going to discuss and this is what the CCT will be meeting about,” he said.
He said no definite dates have been set and that they would be arranged after consultations with members of the Committee.
At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Kampala last November, Sri Lanka proposed at the foreign ministers’ meeting the holding of a ministerial level conference on terrorism and promised to host it.
At the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers meeting in New York last month Foreign Minister Bogollagama called on the organization to progress towards evolving more practical measures to combat terrorism.
He also urged the ministers to draw on the wealth of experience within the member states to enhance the Commonwealth Plan of Action on Terrorism.
Besides Australia, the CCT which was established by the previous Commonwealth Secretary General Don McKinnon following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, consists of Bahamas, Britain, Canada, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Tonga.
This committee has not met since November 2003. The ‘white’ Commonwealth tried to undermine the McKinnon effort by arguing that it should be at officials’ and not ministers’ level so as to downgrade its importance and ensure that official level decisions would need to be endorsed at the political level.
Even in New York last month there were attempts by the ‘white’ Commonwealth, especially Canada to raise questions on the need for such a meeting in Colombo, arguing that combating terrorism should be left to the United Nations and the Commonwealth should not duplicate the work of the UN.
However it is understood that other member states such as Malaysia had argued strongly for a meeting. | 
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