Attempts to come to a political solution to the crisis in Sri Lanka started way back, right from independence in 1948 when the British left. I don't want to give you too much of a history lesson, because I know most of you are well versed in some aspects of Sri Lankan history. But when the British left, essentially they left the island, and when they left they granted independence. They left the island of Sri Lanka as a unitary state, and that did cause considerable concern even during the debate about independence from various Tamil political parties at the time. So as I mentioned, right from the first instance of a peace negotiation or some kind of a devolution package with the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact--and that goes right from the 1950s and 1960s straight to various other attempts during armed conflict--several peace agreements were formed. Most recently the Interim Self-Governing Authority was a proposal brought forward by the LTTE in terms of a political solution.
In most of those, the concessions were that the Tamil community would consider something less than a separate state if they had regional and local political autonomy. Some of the main issues are having control over language and education, so devolution of power from the central government.
I'm going to hand it over to David to speak a bit more on who broke which pacts.