Tigers aiming to bully govt ahead of talks: Official

Colombo, Oct 22: Tamil Tiger rebels were trying to intimidate the Sri Lankan government ahead of crunch peace talks next week by launching high-profile attacks, the head of the state's peace agency said.

There has been a surge of violence in the island nation in the past month with scores of people being killed in rebel attacks.

Both sides meet in Geneva on October 28-29 to try and end the fighting that has killed around a 1,000 people since July and made a 2002 ceasefire almost redundant.

''They seem to be following a strategy designed to intimidate the government,'' Palitha Kohona, the Secretary General of the state's peace secretariat, which coordinates and handles peace dialogue for Colombo, told Reuters in an interview.

''My own view is that they are not going to get any leverage as the result of the violence and terrorism.

Rebel leaders were not immediately available for comment.

Kohona said the ongoing violence must not derail the talks.

''I think we must separate the talks from the violence. The talks are designed to create an environment to achieve a sustainable, lasting peace,'' he said late yesterday.

Sporadic violence, including mortar attacks, continued over the weekend in the troubled north and east in the run-up to the first face-to-face talks between the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- which is fighting for an independent homeland for the Tamil minority -- since February.

On Wednesday, the rebels launched a sea-borne suicide raid on a naval base in the southern city of Galle, losing 15 of their cadres while killing one government sailor.

The attack was the first such strike by the LTTE so far down in the Sinhalese-dominated south. Two days earlier, the rebels rammed an explosives-laden truck into a naval convoy in north-central Sri Lanka, killing about 100 people, mostly sailors.

Approaching Talks through Violence?

''To approach negotiations through piles of dead bodies and broken limbs appears to me a contradiction in terms,'' the soft-spoken Kohona, sitting his 10th floor office in a heavily-guarded building in the heart of Colombo, said.

But the official website of the LTTE said Sri Lankan artillery and air strikes were hitting civilians.

It said a strike by air force jets had killed three children in north last week. The military said it could not confirm the incident and that it does not target civilians but added it retaliates to rebel fire in the area where the incident occurred.

More than 65,000 people have been killed in the two-decade conflict fuelled by complaints from Tamils about discrimination by the government and sections of the Sinhalese majority.

The government plans to focus in the talks on elections in the restive north and east, the question of child soldiers, and the need for peace to bring in development to the region.

Kohona said a pact planned this week between the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the opposition United National Party (UNP) on several issues including a joint approach on finding a political settlement to the conflict would give more flexibility to the government negotiators ahead of talks.

The SLFP and UNP are the major parties in the south of the island nation, the heartland for the majority Sinhalese.

''Now, for the first time, the south is united,'' Kohona, an adviser to President Mahinda Rajapakse on the peace talks, said.

''This certainly does counter an argument that the Tigers had always used for not seriously engaging in discussions which was that the south was incapable of delivering due to the fractured nature of its politics.''

Reuters

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