LTTE upset over Lankan Army Chief visit to India

Colombo, Mar 11: The Tamil Tiger rebels today slammed India for offering a state welcome to Sri Lankan Army Chief Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka claiming that the move has deeply hurt the Tamil people. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in a statement, strongly condemned the Indian State action of extending a State welcome to the military chief of the Sinhala State which unilaterally abrogated the ceasefire agreement and has launched widespread military offensives in the Tamil homeland, a LTTE statement from its headquarters in Wanni said.

General Fonseka survived an LTTE suicide assassination bid in 2006 April with serious injuries inside the military headquarters in Colombo. In a strongly worded statement, the rebels charged that the Indian government was offering such encouragement to the Rajapaksa government at a time when the Sri Lankan State was facing many warnings and condemnations for its attempt to seek a military solution and for its enormous human rights violations.

The statement said many of the European countries have halted all assistance in protest of the military approach of the government. The Indian State also knows this truth. Yet, while pronouncing that a solution to the Tamil problem must be found through peaceful means, it is giving encouragement to the military approach of the Sinhala State. This can only lead to the intensification of the genocide of the Tamils, it claimed.

"LTTE wishes to point out to the India that this historic blunder by it will continue to subject the Eelam Tamils to misery and put them in the dangerous situation of having to face ethnic genocide on a massive scale, it accused, pleading the Tamils of Tamil Nadu to understand this anti-Tamil move of the Indian State and express their condemnation." The LTTE statement comes at a time when President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, has repeatedly vowed that the ongoing military onslaught against the rebels would continue until the last LTTEer is killed.

President Rajapaksa in a recent public rally, said wiping out terrorism completely is pre-requisite for any political solution. The rebel statement concluded by saying that the Indian State must take the responsibility for the ethnic genocide of the Tamils that will be carried out by the Sinhala military re-invigorated by such moves of the Indian State.

There was no immediate reaction either from the government of India or from the government of India with regard to LTTE's latest charges.

UNI