Breakaway rebel group joins call for delinking provinces by Sinha Ratnatunga

Colombo: A breakaway group of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has joined hands with a nationalist organisation of majority Sinhalese calling for the delinking of the north and east provinces as one administrative unit, a long-time demand of the minority rebels.

Members of the "Karuna‚ group", former fighting cadres of the LTTE, who have hitherto been carrying out undercover military operations against the LTTE, have taken part in a meeting in Colombo organised by the Patriotic National Movement (PNM), an alliance of Sinhala nationalists to renew this campaign for "demerger" of the Tamil-populated provinces of the island, where the rebels are demanding a separate state.

Organisers of the event said the main aim of their campaign would be to de-merge the East from the Northern Province which is temporarily merged currently under the controversial 1987 India-Lanka peace accord, but other objectives would be to "protect the rights of the people in the east".

Tamil rebels belonging to the LTTE are opposed to the delinking of the two provinces.

The new alliance has formed a task force calling it "Defenders of Eastern People's Rights" comprising Sinhalese nationalist parties, and Muslim and Tamil groups in the eastern province where the country's three main ethnic groups are equally distributed.

This task force was launched after a meeting with the Marxists Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the National Muslim Congress, the All-Island Tamil United Front and key operatives of the Karuna group.

A PNM officials said that the alliance was formed to fight a common enemy (the LTTE), and that though the group had political and other differences among themselves, they felt that they owed the people of the east a duty to be protected from the Tiger rebels.

ABUSE
Unicef: Tigers still recruit children

Children are still being kidnapped by Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers to train as fighters, the UN children's agency Unicef says, but the abductions appear to be less frequent four years into a ceasefire.

The number of children taken by the Tigers has fallen every year since a 2002 ceasefire halted two decades of civil war, Unicef senior programme co-ordinator Yasmin Ali Haque said, but child recruitment was still continuing at an unacceptable level.

"Most of them are forcible," she told Reuters in an interview late on Wednesday in Unicef's Colombo office. "Children going home from school are apprehended. They're sat behind a motorcycle and then they're off. They're gone."

Finding a lasting end to a war that has already killed more than 64,000 people was key to giving children more options and stopping them from wanting to fight, she said. Talks between the government and Tigers are due to continue in Switzerland next month, but the rebels continue to threaten a return to war.

(http://www.gulfnews.com/world/Sri_Lanka/10027818.html)