"No two historians ever agree on what
happened, and the damn thing is they both think they're telling the
truth."  Harry S. Truman.

Conflicts have been the part of human
civilization. They are as old as the human civilization itself. Today I came
across a book review in DNA and thought why not share my ideas with you people.

Conflicts have been going on all over the world in
South Asia, it is Sri Lanka and Kashmir; in Europe, it is Bosnia and Cyprus;
and in the Middle-East, it is the Palestine-Israel conflict.

In the case of the Israel-Palestine peace
process, the US has never played the role of a honest broker — consistently
taking a pro-Tel Aviv stand, which helped to destroy its own credibility —and
this is well known.

The conventional wisdom is that, even if both
sides are at fault, the Palestinians are irrational “terrorists” who have no
point of view worth listening to. Their homeland for over a thousand years was
taken, without their consent and mostly by force, during the creation of the
state of Israel. And all subsequent crimes — on both sides — inevitably follow
from this original injustice

About India’s role in Sri Lanka during the 1980s,
the disastrous and counterproductive nature of India’s third-party intervention
in the late 1980s does not detract from the reality that constructive
third-party involvement is vitally important to prospects of ending civil wars
and hammering out durable settlements.

The crucial missing link in the Lanka peace
process is the absence of a neutral and credible third party, an international
actor that could, through its involvement, help bridge the deep distrust and
animosity between the belligerents.

Norway’s role as peace facilitator is limited
because a small do-gooder country is not taken seriously either by the Tamil
Tigers or the Sri Lankan government.

Norway does not have either the clout or the
understanding to get the talks going afresh. It is what its role suggests:
simply a ‘facilitator’. The US, busy with its own war on terror in Iraq and
Afghanistan, takes just perfunctory interest in the island state because it
doesn’t seem to have much economic interest there

So who should step in? It can only be India.

But India has adopted a hands-off policy after
the assassination of former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown to bits
by a LTTE woman suicide bomber.

There is a need for meaningful devolution of
power, the necessity of giving the Tamil and Muslim minorities a stake in the
system