Sri Lanka will look to start talks on a $4 billion dollar loan by sending a high level team to Washington, said the Finance Minister, Ravi Karunanayake, on Thursday.

Speaking to reporters in Colombo, Mr Karunayake, said,

“There is a lot of international goodwill and we can get finance from the IMF and World Bank at 0,5 percent.”

TNPF President Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam (right) and General Secretary Selvarajah Kajendran (left)

The Tamil National People's Front (TNPF) welcomed the resolution passed by the Northern Provincial Council calling for an UN inquiry into the genocide of the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan state, as a "victory for all of us".

"We fully support yesterday's resolution, and highly praise the Northern Provincial Council and its chief minister, C V Wigneswaran," the TNPF president, Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam told a media briefing at the Jaffna Press Club on Wednesday.

Acknowledging the party's long-standing objection to the provincial council system as an inadequate starting point to resolving the ethnic conflict on the island, Mr Ponnambalam said he nonetheless wholly praised the passage of the resolution within such an oppressive system, and pledged to work under the leadership of Mr Wigneswaran to work towards the issues raised in the resolution.

"[The resolution] is a big blow to a system that seeks to repress our [Tamil] nation's politics into a unitary state," he said.

The Tamil National Alliance MP for Batticaloa, P Ariyanethiran, welcomed the resolution passed by the Northern Provincial Council on Tuesday, which called on the UN to investigate charges of genocide and prosecute those responsible at the International Criminal Court.

“Our position is the same as the NPC. We welcome the resolution and wish to add to the call for a UN probe into genocide and prosecutions of those responsible,” the MP, who is based in the Eastern Province, told the Tamil Guardian over the phone.

Mr Ariyenethiran echoed the NPC’s demand for an international investigation, regardless of whether the government conducts its own inquiry, saying that a domestic inquiry is designed to “cover up” the mass atrocities committed by the government.

Tamils living in villages in Kilinochchi demanded the Sri Lankan government issues them with certificates for their land, during a protest in the district capital today,

Residents accused the government of deliberately withholding the certificates, in some cases for 25 years, which they require in order to be eligible for funds from the housing scheme, to connect to the electrical grid and other development. The land concerned is in the villages of Nathakkudiyiruppu, Ulavanoor and Punnaineeraavi, all in the Kilinochchi district’s Kandaavalai regional secretariat division.

Health workers protested the government’s refusal to offer them permanent contracts at Jaffna Hospital despite working there for 10 years, for a second continuous day in Jaffna.

Protesting outside the  offices of the Northern Province Health Minister P Sathiyalingam and Secretary for the Ministry of Health, R Raveendran, the local health workers demanded a reason for not being given permanent post at the hospital over 127 other less experienced volunteers at Jaffna Hospital, reports Uthayan.