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LTTE
‘a brutal terror machine’: Mangala Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera, capping an official visit to Washington where he sought American help to avoid a slide back into war in the island, said Colombo was “still willing to walk that extra mile for peace.” “This is not because of any weakness but because we are a government committed to a negotiated settlement to this problem and we do not think that war is an option,” he told reporters. “We want to bring international pressure on the LTTE to come and sit with us at the table to discuss the weaknesses of the cease-fire and find ways and means of strengthening it so these dastardly acts do not happen again,” Mr. Samaraweera added. Amid continuing violence, the government and the LTTE are each accusing the other of being behind a string of deadly attacks that is straining a 2002 ceasefire to breaking point. Mr. Samaraweera called on the international community to press the LTTE “as much as possible, as hard as possible” to return to ceasefire talks. Despite vowing to keep talking to avoid war, he decried the LTTE as a “brutal terror machine” that had over past decades killed leading Sri Lankan Tamils as well as majority Buddhist Sinhalese. The United States banned the LTTE in 1997 and U.S. forces have been training Sri Lankan troops, but diplomats in Colombo say there is no chance Washington would wade in militarily if the violence spirals into war. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had lauded the Sri Lankan government for its restraint in the face of the Tamil Tigers' provocations and vowed to work with Sri Lanka to defeat terrorism and promote peace. Samaraweera
also warned that while the government remained patient, Colombo
was concerned that “there will come a point where the public
would be provoked into actions which the government may not be able
to control.” |
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