COLOMBO, June 27: Muslims set fire to tyres and blocked main roads in eastern Sri Lanka on Monday to demand a greater say in the government’s controversial deal to share tsunami aid with Tamil Tiger rebels. Traffic in Muslim-dominated towns in eastern coastal regions came to a standstill as crowds blocked roads and forced the closure of shops.

“They want their political leaders in government to resign,” said the senior official.

The Muslim National Unity Alliance said on Sunday it would quit the ruling coalition in two days unless the president drops the aid deal clinched with the Tigers (LTTE) on Friday to distribute billions of dollars in foreign aid.

A nationalist party, the People’s United Front (MEP), which had expressed reservations about the deal, on Monday decided to stick with President Kumaratunga’s coalition, a party official said after internal talks.

However, the influential Muslim Council of Sri Lanka joined growing opposition to the deal. It decided at a meeting to ask the international community to press the government to include it as equal partners with the LTTE.

The Muslims say they had been marginalized in the Norwegian-brokered deal to establish an aid-sharing mechanism, which has been widely hailed as a possible prelude to restarting peace talks between the two sides.

The highest-level committee has three members — one Tiger representative, one from the government and the third from the Muslim community.

However, in the second-level Regional Committee which has hands-on authority to decide where money should be spent, Muslims have three out of 10 seats while the Tigers take five and the Colombo government two.

Muslims fear that the tsunami deal between the government and the LTTE would set a precedent for an eventual peace deal that would ignore their aspirations.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga has already lost her majority in parliament following the withdrawal of support earlier this month by her Marxist JVP ally.

However, the main opposition United National Party (UNP) has said it will support Ms Kumaratunga to ensure implementation of the pact with the Tigers, who waged a 30-year armed conflict until an Oslo-brokered truce in Feb 2002.

Another Muslim leader Rauf Hakeem, who is also a former peace negotiator, said their demand went beyond representation. “What we want is not just representation, but recognition as a key stakeholder.”—AFP