Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Chennai, Dec. 17: The messy Sri Lankan ethnic conflict is taking yet another little twist in the next couple of days with three senior Tamil leaders opposed to the LTTE flying to Delhi to seek Indian involvement for ending the war that has so far consumed over 70,000 lives in about 25 years.
With the Sri Lankan government stepping up its military operations, having tasted success pushing the LTTE out of the eastern region, and the Tigers too matching the bloodletting through suicide attacks, claymore mine blasts and raids by their newly acquired "air force", it only seems that the island nation will not taste peace in the near future. Unless India takes an active role in the search for a negotiated political settlement, feel the moderates among the Sri Lankan Tamils.
Three of them, Mr V. Anandasangaree of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), Mr D. Sitharthan of the Peoples’ Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) and Mr T. Sritharan of the Eelam Peoples’ Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), will arrive in Delhi on Wednesday to lobby for the Indian involvement to end the conflict. The three Tamil leaders, opposed to the LTTE, are expected to meet some Central ministers, MPs, political leaders and government officials, for this purpose, according to information reaching here. The TULF and EPRLF have split over supporting the LTTE and a large chunk of their members are with the Tigers.
The three Tamil leaders would like to canvas support for their initiative aimed at pressuring Colombo to give up its obsession with military option as a means to end the war with the Tigers. By pursuing such a strategy, the Mahinda Rajapaksa government was causing enormous suffering on the common Tamil people, still weathering it out in the heat of the stepped-up conflict unlike thousands of their brethren who fled the island to safe refugee shelters abroad. The government is pushing its military strategy hoping to capture the Tiger territory in the north and hopes to force the Tigers to negotiate from a position of weakness — a near-impossible prospect if one really knows the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran. Though the government appears to have gained an upper hand in recent months, thanks to help from some foreign powers providing critical military hardware.
Source: http://www.asianage.com/presentation/leftnavigation/news/india/tamil-leaders-ask-india-to-help-end-lanka-strife.aspx
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