Sri Lanka rebels say EU ban to hurt peace process

By Simon Gardner

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels warned
on Tuesday a European Union ban that diplomats say will freeze
their assets would shake the island’s teetering peace process,
but said they remained committed to a truce.

Diplomats in Brussels said the 25-nation bloc listed the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a banned terrorist
organization overnight amid a sharp escalation in attacks and
clashes with Sri Lanka’s military.

The Tigers, who had earlier said proscription would deter
them from returning to talks aimed at permanently halting a
two-decade civil war and would “exacerbate the conditions of
war,” now want the EU to sanction the government — which they
accuse of helping a band of former comrades to attack them.

“This ban is not going to help to promote the peace
process,” S. Puleedevan, head of the Tigers’ peace secretariat,
told Reuters from the northern rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi.

“This is really going to disturb the parity of status of
the parties, which is very fundamental for the peace process,”
he added. “This is really going to shake the fundamentals.”

The ban is a diplomatic slap in the face for the rebels,
who have sought to project an image abroad as viable leaders of
a de facto state they want recognised as a separate homeland
for ethnic Tamils in the island’s north and east.

The United States, Britain, Canada and India have already
outlawed the Tigers.

Analysts say an EU freeze on assets would hurt the war
chest of the Tigers, who have used past trips to Europe during
peace talks to raise funds from expatriate Tamils.

“We are hopeful that this ban … would persuade the Tamil
Tigers to come in and talk to the government,” said senior
presidential aide Ajith Nivard Cabraal.

“One of the main ingredients of any activity of a terrorist
group would be the money that they have, and if that dries up,
it is going to hamper that work,” Nivard Cabraal said.
“Hopefully that would act as a deterrent.”

DONORS MEET

The island’s main donors — Japan, Norway, the United
States and the European Union — who together have pledged $4.5
billion in aid to foster peace in Sri Lanka, met in Tokyo on
Tuesday to assess the island’s deteriorating security
situation.

“The situation in Sri Lanka is of our gravest concern,”
Japan’s special peace envoy, Yasushi Akashi, told the meeting.
“We are now indeed in a very crucial and critical turning-point
in Sri Lanka.”

More than 290 soldiers, police, civilians and rebels have
been killed in a rash of attacks from suicide bombings to naval
clashes since February in what the truce monitors and Tigers
now call a “low intensity war.”

Police said suspected Tigers had shot dead 12
majority-Sinhalese labourers in the restive east late on Monday
in the latest in a rash of deadly attacks. The rebels denied
any involvement.

The Tigers accuse the military of helping a breakaway band
of former comrades to kill their fighters and murder ethnic
Tamil civilians, and security analysts see a pattern of
tit-for-tat attacks between the military and the rebels.

“Now the time has come for the EU to prove that they are
even-handed and they will also exert pressure on the Sri Lankan
government side for the atrocities committed by the armed
forces and paramilitary groups,” Puleedevan said.

“We’ll see how the EU is going to prove their impartiality
and neutrality,” he added.

Many ordinary Sri Lankans already displaced by years of war
fear a return to a full-scale conflict that killed more than
64,000 people before a 2002 ceasefire.

(Additional reporting by Teruaki Ueno in TOKYO and Ingrid
Melander in BRUSSELS)