COLOMBO: With the European Union currently mulling to ban the LTTE, a visiting senior US official said on Tuesday that the US ‘will encourage’ the EU to declare the Tamil Tiger outfit as a terrorist organisation. “We think the LTTE is very deserving of that label.

We think it will help cut off financial supplies and weapons procurement,” US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Camp said on Tuesday at the end of a two-day visit. Blaming the LTTE for ‘starting’ the violence in Sri Lanka that has left a four-year-old ceasefire tottering, Camp told State television that the United States had asked the European Union to follow its lead and ban the LTTE.

His comments came as the US State Department Under Secretary Nicholas Burns planned to represent the United States at a high level meeting of the co-chairs to the Lankan peace process in Tokyo on May 30. The meeting will be held with representatives of the four co-chairs, namely US, EU, Japan and Norway to discuss aid provision to Sri Lanka.

The international community, which is playing a key role in the Sri Lankan peace process since February 2002, is represented by the co-chairs of the Aid Lanka Conference held in Tokyo in June 2003. The donors’ conference had pledged $4.5 billion to Sri Lanka but with the two warring parties, the government and the LTTE nowhere near a permanent solution to the conflict, analysts say the tsunami-battered country could lose out on a major chance to carry out large scale rehabilitation projects.

Meanwhile local peace lobbyists last week hit out at the government claiming that the Mahinda Rajapakse administration lacked a clear stra

“We desperately need a strategy by the government to end the violence. We need a strategy – a political strategy - to confront the LTTE with”, Dr. Pakiasothy Saravanamuthu, Head of the Colombo-based think-tank, the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), told Dawn. “Soon it will be too late”, Saravanamuthu warned, days after both the LTTE and the government insinuated that they were not willing to compromise.

The LTTE which has not abandoned its separate northeastern homeland concept is faced with a determined President who says he will never allow the country to be divided.

Last week President Mahinda Rajapakse talked tough, stating the government will be forced to respond if the Tamil Tigers continue with attacks on government forces. His comments in an interview with The Sunday Times in Colombo came in the wake of a deadly Sea Tiger attack on a Naval flotilla in the north eastern seas on May 11 which left 17 Navy personnel dead. Earlier in the week the Government Peace Secretariat reacted strongly to LTTE claims of having sovereign rights to sea, saying no entity could assert such rights unless recognized as a State.

In a hard-hitting statement, the Government Peace Secretariat lambasted LTTE claims posted on the pro rebel TamilNet website, stating that the “ceasefire and the entire peace process between the LTTE and the Government is a process based on parity of status and military power balance”.

The peace secretariat statement was emphatic that a lasting solution would be sought within a ‘united, undivided Sri Lanka’ and in a manner that did not violate the country’s ‘sovereignty and territorial integrity’.

But analysts say the chances of the LTTE, which already runs its own de facto administration in pockets of areas in the north east agreeing to a solution in a ‘united and undivided country’ were zero. Although sources within the peace secretariat indicated that the government was scrutinizing different aspects of federalism in a bid to dissolve power to the regions including the north and east, the LTTE has not ventured beyond demanding its own ‘homeland’ and ‘self determination’.

With the government pushing for the banning of the LTTE in the EU, analysts note that international leniency is one reason why the LTTE was evading peace talks and say the ban is a desperate necessity to stop the LTTE indulging in continuous violence.

“The ban would pressurize the LTTE to stop its killing rampage targeting non-LTTE supporting Tamils and government troops. It would push the LTTE to approach the democratic framework”, says Udaya Gammampilla, a senior member of the Sinhala nationalistic political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) or National Heritage Party.

Meanwhile on Wednesday, suspected Tamil Tiger rebels triggered an anti-personnel mine in the eastern district of Batticaloa killing two soldiers and injuring one, the military said, in the continuing violence that the Nordic Truce monitors described as a ‘low intensity war’ that has left over 250 persons dead since beginning April.