COLOMBO, June 25: Sri Lanka’s main Muslim party said on Saturday it would boycott a landmark tsunami aid-sharing deal between the government and the Tamil Tigers that is seen as a prelude to resuming stalled peace negotiations.

The announcement compounded worries for the shaky minority government.

The Norwegian-brokered deal signed on Friday between Colombo and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been widely hailed as a prelude to restarting peace talks between the two sides.

But Muslims said they feared it would make them more marginalized.

The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) party said they had been ignored in the deal clinched in secret despite Muslims being a ‘principle stakeholder’ in embattled regions.

“We want a review of the joint mechanism and if not we will not participate in it,” SLMC leader Rauf Hakeem told reporters here. “We must have some mechanism (to deliver tsunami aid), but this is not the way to go about it.”

Mr Hakeem said their demands went beyond mere representation in the three-tier mechanism set up on Friday and they wanted to be recognized as a key stakeholder.

“We have been relegated to a secondary minority community, but everyone knows without our cooperation this cannot work.”

Under the deal, the government and the Tigers will jointly handle millions of dollars in foreign aid for survivors of the Dec 26 tsunami, which killed at least 31,000 people and displaced one million in the country. Mr Hakeem said the party would use ‘non-cooperation’ as a political tool to force the LTTE and government to review the deal.

Muslims are Sri Lanka’s second-largest minority after Tamils and account for 7.5 per cent of the country’s 19.5 million population. The majority Sinhalese represent 70 per cent while the rest are ethnic Tamils.

Mr Hakeem, who is a member of parliament and has six legislators with him in the 225-member national assembly where President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government is a minority, said he was asking other Muslims to unite with him.

Most of the tsunami destruction was in the embattled north and east, much of which is dominated by the Tigers.

But Muslims say more than half the victims were from their community and therefore they should have a greater voice in aid distribution.

Mr Hakeem said Friday’s deal would have serious implications for the Muslim community in a future peace deal between the government and the Tamil Tigers. The Muslims fear such an agreement would ignore their aspirations.

“In the future, this deal will be taken as a precedent and our political aspirations will be crushed,” Mr Hakeem said.

He drew a distinction, however, between the Muslims’ opposition and that of the Marxist JVP, or People’s Liberation Front, which quit the government last week protesting the deal before it was concluded.

“We’re not saying, ‘Don’t negotiate with the LTTE.’ We want engagement both with the government and the LTTE,” Mr Hakeem said. “We want to coexist peacefully in the northeast.”

The JVP has said it will stage nationwide protests against the deal, branding it a stepping stone for the island’s break-up and legitimizing the Tamil rebels.

Peacebroker Norway as well as President Kumaratunga said the pact was a good sign for reviving direct negotiations on hold since April 2003.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan welcomed the deal as an ‘important day’ for the island. Mr Annan believes both sides ‘have done the right thing in placing people’s needs first’, a spokesman said in a statement.

Mr Annan also ‘welcomes the inclusion of the Muslim minority in the committees that will administer the funds’, the spokesman added.—AFP