Sri Lanka''s peace process is back on track but patience is sorely needed and will be key to any success, Norwegian envoy Erik Solheim said Thursday last week - a day after the government and Tamil Tigers agreed to meet for talks.



Solheim, leading Norwegian efforts to bring a lasting end to the war since secret negotiations began in 1998, said when he started he would not have believed there would be so little progress in eight years.



"When I started on a full time basis, I thought it would maybe take half a year," Solheim told Reuters after finally persuading the two sides Switzerland was a mutually acceptable venue for fresh talks.



"Patience was important in this process and it still is. It will not be sorted out in a few months."



Norway is aiming to replace Solheim - who is now also the country''s international development minister - with a new envoy, but diplomats say replacing his personal relationship with key figures, including Tiger leader Velupillai Pirapaharan, is all but impossible.



Sitting in his Colombo hotel room with his shoes kicked off and looking visibly exhausted, Solheim said he was pleased senior members of the two sides - although not their leaders - had agreed to meet to discuss the ceasefire''s implementation.



He had taken a helicopter ride 200 km (130 miles) north to the LTTE stronghold of Kilinochchi to meet the Tigers, came back and held a meeting with President Mahinda Rajapakse before starting to finalize arrangements for the talks.



"It''s definitely important - a clear positive step forward, but only one step," he said. "There had been a gradual turning to the worse for the last months, definitely now there is a step in the right direction.



"The parties can use this momentum to find a way to stop the violence and the killings and, based on that, move closer toward a settlement."



The gulf between the two sides remains vast. The Tigers say they want autonomy in Tamil-held areas, while Rajapakse says he wants a unitary state and is allied to hardline parties who oppose concessions.



"There is real enthusiasm for peace but possibly not real enthusiasm for the necessary compromises," Solheim said. "I would not advise on the specifics of the compromises. It''s a complex matter."



He said there was a risk some elements might try to disrupt or sabotage the process. Diplomats fear more killings may spark new violence.



"The big risk are spoilers who want to produce violence to undermine this positive effort," Solheim said. "At the moment the parties should do their utmost to stop violence, but they should not let violent elements and spoilers derail the process."



Norway was willing to continue its attempts to broker a lasting settlement as long as it believed both sides ultimately wanted peace and were not using the Norwegians - invited because of their experience in the Middle East - for their own ends, he said.



But setting an agreement the island''s majority Buddhist Sinhalese and minority Tamil-speaking Hindus, Muslim and Christian communities would take time, he said.



"I think there''s no other place in the entire world where four major key world religions are meeting themselves on one small island and they all make up a substantial part of the population," Solheim said. "If this was easy to solve, it would have been solved a long time back."