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Lankan Tamils will seek India's involvement to resolve ethnic crisis

Sri Lankan Tamils hope to use next week's SAARC summit in Colombo to re-focus world attention on the island's ''forgotten war'' and re-involve India in finding a durable solution to the protracted conflict, sources said.

Though news from the battlefront, with its daily toll of casualties, will remain blacked out during the summit under the government's press censorship, the Tamil leaders plan to appeal jointly or separately to SAARC leaders when they arrive in Colombo to help end the bloody conflict, the sources said.

As the SAARC leaders commence their summit in Colombo, prayer campaigns will be launched in temples, churches and schools in the embattled north for peace and Indian mediation to end the war, a Tamil leader said.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is organising protest marches, meetings and demonstrations in the areas under its control during the summit to focus attention on the miserable conditions in which people in the region live.

Sources said the Tigers planned to petition the SAARC leaders through the International Committee of Red Cross and the government agent in Mullaitivu on the plight of the civilians.

The presence of Prime Minister A B Vajpayee would be an added impetus to the moves to get India back on the centre-stage of the mediation exercise because most Tamil leaders feel that he would be more sympathetic to their people's plight than his predecessor, I K Gujral.

The Tamil leaders had emerged disappointed after a meeting with Gujral when he visited Colombo in January 1997 as the foreign minister to co-chair the third meeting of the Indo-Sri Lankan Joint Commission.

Gujral had ruled out Indian involvement in the island's conflict in the light of the experience of the controversial July 1987 Indo- Sri Lanka accord and the subsequent disastrous deployment of the Indian Peace Keeping Force.

What galled the Tamil leaders more was his assertion that the government of President Chandrika Kumaratunga was sincere in resolving the ethnic problem through its devolution package and his advice to them to co-operate with the government.

''We would have got more sympathy from a Buddhist monk,'' commented a Tamil leader sardonically after the meeting.

''We want to tell him (Vajpayee) that in Sri Lankan politics in the last 20 years, no leader has shown the capacity to solve the problem peacefully. Successive governments had, instead, tried for a military solution,'' said Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front leader K Premachandran.

''We need Indian help to solve the problem,'' he said, adding that peace in Sri Lanka was also important for India's security.

''For the past eight years, India has forgotten about our plight,'' Premachandran said. But he and the other Tamil leaders were confident the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in New Delhi would view the island's conflict differently from its predecessor and be more sympathetic to the Tamils' aspirations.

Most Tamil leaders feel that only New Delhi had the leverage with all the parties involved in the conflict -- the Sri Lankan government, the LTTE and the other Tamil parties -- and use it to help arrive at a settlement.

Despite the Indian ban on the LTTE and the total lack of trust between the two sides, New Delhi could still pressurise the Tigers to fall in line through various means, they said.

Most Tamil parties have sought meetings with Vajpayee during his stay in Colombo.

Tamil United Liberation Front president M Sivasithamparam said they would appeal to Vajpayee to help end the war.

He said India could play the role of a ''catalyst'' by pushing both the government and the main Opposition, the United National Party to agree to a settlement of the conflict.

''India has a role, what role it should be is a matter for India to decide,'' he said.

New Delhi's stand, that the problems of the Tamils should be settled within the framework of the territorial integrity of the island-nation, should remove any reservation on the part of the Sinhala parties about an Indian role in ending the conflict, he said.

A spokesman for the Indian high commission confirmed that several requests had been received from the Tamil parties for a meeting with the prime minister.

''We are still looking at the request and considering how to accommodate them,'' he said.

UNI

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