Sri Lankans miffed as Danish artists poke fun at war

COLOMBO, Oct 3 (Reuters) Two Danish artists travelling the world's hotspots from Baghdad to Serbia to poke fun at conflict slapped stickers with ironic messages across the Sri Lankan capital on Monday -- but the joke was lost on residents.

''Potentially prosperous society -- Of course you kill each other!'' reads the caption of one sticker, depicting a gun with a flower dropping out of the barrel.

''We just want people to use their common sense and stop violence. That's our aim,'' said artist and copywriter Jan Egesborg yesterday as he pasted his conceptual art to a wall opposite a sandbag army bunker in downtown Colombo just hours after stepping off a flight from Copenhagen.

Hundreds of civilians, armed forces personnel and Tamil Tiger rebels have been killed since late July amid a new chapter in a two-decade civil war that has already killed more than 65,000 people since 1983, and analysts fear the violence will deepen despite efforts to restart peace talks.

Passers-by looked blankly at the stickers, before moving on their way.

''People do strange things,'' said 27-year-old auto-rickshaw driver Prasanna Perera. ''We can't understand what they are doing. Normally foreigners come here to create problems.'' Egesborg and his art group Surrend aim to head to Kabul in Afghanistan next, and plan to stage an exhibition of their work in Copenhagen in 2008.

''It's a beautiful island, a very prosperous society ... it is crazy this escalation of violence,'' he said.

REUTERS BDP KP0927