Sri Lanka spells out conditions for talks to Norway - reports

What about the SL Govt?I think both sides should give a written assurance to some higher,neutral authority that has moral standing and will ensure that the assurances are not taken lightly like the ceasefire agreement.

Hey What's all this nonsense? Sri Lanka is a sovereign state. Do Not Forget That; and the Sri Lankan Government is a democraticaly elected Government. This is drastically differes from a Facist Terrorist outfit like the LTTE where killings are at it's will.

Democratic Govt does not mean you have elections.There should be integrity,rule of law and good governance.Your Govt.is a terrorist Govt.Your people can't find jobs in your own country and have to do menial work in far away places.Don't give me that sovereign state bullshit.

Bull shit is all what you can eat. So what else I can give. Truth and reality is not terrorist feed.

Don't provoke Tigers

The Tamils of Sri Lanka are fighting for their independence after decades of oppression
By ERIC MARGOLIS, TORONTO SUN


CALGARY -- This week's arrest of six Canadians of Tamil origin on terrorism charges reminds me of Sir Peter Ustinov's brilliant maxim: "Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich."

In an apparent rush to U.S. President George Bush's ideology and policies, the Harper government recently added Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers guerillas to its terrorism list. The U.S. added the group last year.

In 1983, civil war erupted in Sri Lanka after decades of growing strife between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Hindu Tamils. Tamil Tigers guerillas have waged a ferocious, bloody struggle against the Sinhalese government for an independent Tamil state. Over 65,000 Sri Lankans have died. The war continues in spite of foreign mediation.

Sri Lanka's Sinhalese control the army, navy and air force. The Tigers have only small arms, in large part purchased with money raised by Canada's 250,000 Tamils.

Canada's Irish did the same for the IRA. Canadian Jews raised funds to buy arms for Israel's independence struggle from Britain. Sikh separatists in Punjab were funded by Canadian Sikhs.

The Tigers are courageous, highly effective fighters -- call them the Hezbollah of South Asia. They used their bodies as human bombs to fight first the government army, then India when it invaded Sri Lanka in the 1980s in an effort to annex the island. A female Tiger blew up Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The Tigers are exceedingly brutal and often murderous. They are a fanatical, highly dangerous totalitarian organization. But they are not "terrorists," as the U.S. and now Canada claim.

Terrorism is generally defined as "attacks on civilians for political purposes." Mad dogs who blow up airliners, trains and schools are terrorists, no question. But under this definition, then what do we call the Allied mass slaughter of civilians in Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

Or Russia's massacre of 100,000 Muslim Chechens a decade ago; Israel's 1982 bombardment of Beirut that killed 18,000 civilians; U.S. destruction in 1991 of Iraq's water treatment plants, creating an epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of children?

What about the indiscriminate bombing of Afghan villages by U.S., Canadian and NATO forces? Or the recent killing of over 1,000 Lebanese and Israeli civilians, denounced by Amnesty International as a war crime?

Those accusing others of terrorism are often far more guilty of it themselves.

Tamil Tigers ably govern a third of Sri Lanka. Dismissing them as "terrorists" is as meaningless and misleading as calling Hezbollah, which is Lebanon's only effective, non-corrupt government, "terrorist thugs."

Enough with propaganda labels. I detest this deceitful, poisonous term, "terrorism," which has become a propaganda weapon to demonize political opponents.

Canada has recently made itself an enemy of the Muslim world and now faces attacks on its citizens and business interests abroad. This is not a good time to kick the Tamil Tigers hornet's nest. Sometimes it's better to avert your gaze, as previous Canadian governments did, and not seek trouble -- particularly when the Tigers have committed no hostile acts against Canada or the U.S.

Terrorism is a tactic, not a thing. Tamil Tigers are fighting for independence after decades of oppression. We westerners have forgotten that armed resistance to intolerable oppression is a legitimate right of all peoples.

One really must ask why Ottawa is sticking its nose into another remote, bloody foreign war and creating new security problems for Canadians when it can't provide even Second World health care to its own people.

Former RAW chief protests India’s ‘ambivalence’ over LTTE

[TamilNet, Sunday, 01 October 2006, 11:41 GMT]
India’s former spy chief has criticised Delhi for not engaging with the both the Liberation Tigers and Sri Lanka’s government to prevent the slide into conflict. "India's inability to fully comprehend the ground realities in Sri Lanka and, hamstrung by the past, its reluctance to do business with LTTE to help evolve an equitable settlement may prove to be a monumental foreign policy blunder,” J.K. Sinha, former head of India’s external intelligence agency said.

“India’s ambivalence interspersed with gratuitous hostile statements towards the LTTE has closed its option to proactively bring about a settlement of the ethnic crisis through negotiations”

"India allowed the gradual erosion of the peace process and remained a virtual bystander," Singh, who headed the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) until last year, says in the latest issue of ‘Indian Defence Review.’

Singh was head of RAW in the past few years during which the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement has disintegrated in a cycle of violence first between Army-backed-paramilitaries and the LTTE and lately between the military and the Tigers.

"Instead of building on the positive developments at Oslo, India allowed its misgivings and suspicions with regard to the LTTE to stifle any follow-up policy initiative," Singh said, in reference to the LTTE’s agreement with the then Sri Lankan government to explore federalism as a solution.

“India was content to remain in the margins.[But] the resumption of civil war in Sri Lanka portends the worst for that country and for India's security concerns in the region,” he says.

"The gradual erosion of the peace process and the resumption of the conflict is a major setback for India and to its security concerns vis-à-vis Sri Lanka."

Singh noted that “India cannot help the Sri Lankan government militarily to defeat the LTTE because of the sentiments in Tamil Nadu and the compelling political constraints that it entails.”

“[But] India’s ambivalence interspersed with gratuitous hostile statements towards the LTTE has closed its option to proactively bring about a settlement of the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka through a process of negotiations,” he also says.

"India's ambivalence about the LTTE and its inability to pull its weight in Sri Lanka in favour of the peace process shall cost India dear. India is now caught between the devil and the deep sea,” Sinha warns.

Singh slammed the seizure by President Chandrika Kumaratunga of three ministries from the government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in late 2003, just days after the LTTE submitted a proposal to set up an interim administration in Sri Lanka's northeast.

"India and the international community should have done all that was possible to prevent (Chandrika) from resorting to the politically dishonest and unconstitutional measure which really scuttled the peace process," Sinha said.

"[Meanwhile] It is indeed ironical that Colombo, which conspired with LTTE to force the return of the Indian Army (in 1990), now looks up to New Delhi to rein in LTTE and play a decisive role as the regional superpower to bring about a durable peace."

How do you expect a country that does not understand international law to abide by agreements?Look at their people.They seem to be sick in the head.They do not want to settle the ethnic problem and expect us to go on provding jobs for their people.The beggar mentality should be stopped.