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Sri Lanka coalition under siege as monks, Tigers raise pressure
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-06-07 20:24

COLOMBO - Sri Lanka's president came under intense pressure as a key minister quit and the influential Buddhist clergy vowed to end her career if she approved an aid-sharing deal with Tamil Tiger rebels.

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) also raised the stakes by warning that a truce arranged by peace broker Norway was under "serious threat," signalling that the country could slip back to war.

The political crisis deepened with the sudden resignation of media minister Mangala Samaraweera, a close confidant of President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who helped put together a coalition after elections in April 2004.

Samaraweera said he resigned for personal reasons. He retained other cabinet posts, but analysts said his role as spokesman was crucial for Kumaratunga's plans to announce a deal to share tsunami aid with the rebels.

The political swirl deepened after the Marxist JVP, or People's Liberation Front, leader Lal Kantha said the party would quit the government the moment Kumaratunga signed an aid deal, officially called the North and East Tsunami Relief Board.

Kumaratunga's government has a five-seat majority in the 225-member parliament and depends on the 39 votes of the JVP.

The JVP-affiliated National Monks' Front also said it would launch a campaign to drum up public support against Kumaratunga's plans.

The monks wield considerable influence over the island's Buddhist majority in the country of 19.5 million people.

"We will first start with a protest and then extend it to a death fast from the weekend unless the president withdraws her decision," the front's secretary monk, Kalawelgala Chandraloka, told reporters on Tuesday.

"If the president goes ahead, we will ensure that it will be the end of her political career. We will make sure that no one accepts her as a political leader in this country."

The remarks were sparked by an advertisement issued in the name of the relief board Tuesday that said an administrative mechanism was needed to fast-track rebuilding in the northeast, one of the areas worst affected by the tsunamis.

Some 31,000 people were killed in the December 26 tsunamis and a million people were initially left homeless. Much of the destruction was in the northeast, parts of which are dominated by the guerrillas.

"Let's stop the debate and decide to move forward," the advertisement urged. "The hope of tens of thousands of children depend on this."

However, Kumaratunga's spokesman Harim Peiris said the advertisement was part of an awareness campaign and not a formal notice of a new relief board or tsunami aid deal.

International donors have called for a joint mechanism to distribute billions of dollars in aid equitably in rebel-held and government areas. Several countries, including Japan and the United States, have laws prohibiting direct aid to the Tigers.

The aid deal is expected to bring the government and rebels into close cooperation on rebuilding, including areas devastated by decades of a civil war that claimed over 60,000 lives between 1972 and 2002.

The LTTE has said it is willing to agree to the aid deal with the government. However it said a continued delay in reaching a deal has threatened a fragile ceasefire.

The LTTE's political wing leader S.P. Thamilselvan told Norway's top envoy in Sri Lanka, Hans Brattskar, Tuesday that the Sri Lankan military was engaged in an "undeclared economic embargo" on rebel-held areas.

"Thamilselvan said that the ceasefire agreement is under serious threat by actions and inaction of the Sri Lankan government," the LTTE's peace secretariat said in a statement after Tuesday's talks in Kilinochchi.

Brattskar travelled to the rebel-held town of Kilinochchi, 330 kilometres (206 miles) north of here, for talks with the Tiger leadership amid mounting tension between troops and the Tigers.

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