April 5, 2003	Saturday	Safar 2, 1424

COLOMBO, April 4: Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels on Friday accused the United States of trying to undermine their peace bid with the government by excluding them from a key aid meeting in Washington.

“Regrettably the US has undermined the joint effort (with the government) by isolating the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and solely promoting the Sri Lankan government,” a rebel statement said Friday.

The rebels added that their exclusion from the reconstruction in the island’s north and the east was against the spirit of the on-going Norwegian-backed peace process.

The LTTE was “dismayed and disappointed by (the) US action,” the rebels said.

The meeting in Washington on April 14 is aimed at setting the stage for an aid pledging conference which Japan is hosting and co-chairing on June 9 and 10 in Tokyo with Sri Lanka’s peace broker Norway, the US and the European Union.

Nearly 30 countries which provide foreign aid to Sri Lanka have confirmed participation at the “peace support seminar” in Washington, the Sri Lankan government announced.

The rebel response came after the US ambassador in Colombo, Ashley Wills, told the press here that the rebel group banned by the US in 1997 would not be invited to the Washington meeting.

The donor meeting in Tokyo is part of the international community’s backing for efforts to end the conflict by helping the government and the rebels to rebuild war-battered zones in the country.

The Sri Lankan government’s top peace negotiator G.L. Peiris on Thursday expressed the hope that the Tokyo conference would garner a substantially larger chunk of donor assistance than Oslo.

More than 60,000 people have been killed in Sri Lanka’s separatist conflict since 1972. —AFP