OSLO, Nov 24: Sri Lanka’s warring parties made their highest level contact in 12 years at a hotel near here Sunday as Norway brought them together to drum up international support for their peace bid.

Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe greeted the chief negotiator of Tamil Tiger rebels, Anton Balasingham, with a “hello, nice to see you” and then the two shook hands for the cameras.

After allowing a brief photo opportunity at the Sonja Henie meeting room of the Holmenkollen Park Hotel, the two men went in for closed-door talks in the presence of Norwegian peace brokers.

Norway’s deputy foreign minister Vidar Helgesen welcomed the two to the wood-panelled room. They watched a steady fall of snow from a picture window overlooking the city of Oslo and the fjord.

The two men are here to attend a conference Monday to seek international political support for Sri Lanka’s fledgling peace bid aimed at ending three decades of ethnic bloodshed that has claimed 60,000 lives.

“This is quite significant,” said Balasingham as he walked in to the meeting room a minute ahead of the Prime Minister. “This will have a very positive effect on our current peace process.”

It is the first time that a top Sri Lankan leader has met with a senior representative of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) since Norway was invited to broker peace talks five years ago.

Balasingham said he had met with Wickremesinghe when he was a government minister in 1990 during a failed attempt to resolve the island’s long-running conflict through dialogue.

The 1990 peace bid failed when the then President Ranasinghe Premadasa held talks with Balasingham in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo.

Three years after that peace attempt, President Premadasa was assassinated by a suicide bomber. The Tigers were blamed for the slaying.

Sri Lanka’s chief negotiator, G. L. Peiris, said the two men were expected to review the peace process and the ongoing truce that has been in place since February 23.

“They will broadly discuss the peace process,” Peiris said.

He himself had a separate round of talks with Balasingham on Sunday.

Both Balasingham and Peiris are heading a political panel set up following the second round of peace talks in Thailand earlier this month.

Norway was invited to mediate by Sri Lanka’s President Chandrika Kumaratunga, but the process remained in limbo from April last year until it was revived by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe in December.

Wickremesinghe’s party defeated the President’s party at parliamentary elections taking Sri Lanka into an uneasy cohabitation government.

TIGERS SET UP COURT: Tiger rebels have set up a law court in eastern Sri Lanka to maintain law and order in rebel-held areas, a pro-rebel Web site said late on Friday.

“We open our police stations and law courts in our areas only and not in areas held by the government to maintain law and order,” the Tamilnet Web site reported Para, the head of the Tamil Eelam Judicial Service, as saying.—Reuters