COLOMBO, 10 October 2003 — Police clamped a dusk-to-dawn curfew on a Muslim town in northeastern Sri Lanka yesterday to prevent an escalation of clashes between minority Muslims and Tamils, officials said. The troubles erupted overnight in the town of Kinniya when Tamil and Muslim villagers clashed over a land dispute, police officials in the area said by telephone.
Army units had been asked to help police maintain law and order in the highly volatile area, where there has been communal violence in the past.
A top Muslim leader, Rauf Hakeem, who is also the ports minister, was flown to the area yesterday to defuse tension, a spokesman for Hakeem said. Police said the curfew was a precaution to prevent fighting between the island’s two main minority groups, the Tamils and the Muslims.
Meanwhile, the defense minister accused Tamil Tiger rebels of doubling their military strength since they entered a Norwegian brokered truce in February last year, but said troops were ready if war broke out. Tilak Marapana, in testimony Wednesday to Parliament, said the military was aware of the buildup of forces by the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, including their conscription of child soldiers, but were preparing military strategies to address any renewed Tiger offensive.
The Tiger buildup has been concentrated in the island’s eastern province, Marapana said, dismissing opposition accusations that the government has turned a blind eye to the rebel build-up in the northeastern port district of Trincomalee. “...The significance is not the number of camps in which this increased strength are stationed in but, the fact that the LTTE strength has nearly doubled since the cease-fire,” Marapana said.
“We have taken this into consideration in the preparation of military strategies to defend the (Trincomalee) harbor and the civilian population in this area as well as for any eventual offensive against the LTTE should the occasion arise.”
He acknowledged that the cease-fire has afforded the Tigers many opportunities to boost their fighting capacity but said that was the price the government had to pay to ensure peace. “When we entered into a cease-fire our aim was to solve the problems we had with the LTTE not by the use of force , but through negotiation,” Marapana said. “We must try to give the peace process a genuine chance without once again dragging the country to a burdensome war.”
The LTTE leadership Wednesday allowed local journalists access to a controversial camp set up in the Trincomalee district despite rulings by the truce monitors that it was in breach of the truce. The rebels argue that they control the area and were entitled to establish a base in the village of Manirasakulam, a claim rejected by the security forces and the independent truce monitors.
Scandinavian truce monitors were, meanwhile, investigating a spate of child conscriptions in the eastern region since the Tigers freed 49 child soldiers to a UNICEF-run halfway home on Friday. The government and the LTTE began observing the truce on Feb. 23 last year and although major clashes have stopped, the guerrillas have been accused of killing over 45 of their rivals in the ensuing months.
The cease-fire is the basis for the Norwegian-backed peace process, but direct talks between the Tigers and the Colombo government have been suspended since the rebels abandoned negotiations in April.
The guerrillas accuse the government of failing to deliver on promises made at the six rounds of talks held since September last year and have made the setting up of an interim administration for embattled areas a pre-condition to resume negotiations.
A rebel delegation is currently in Dublin meting with legal and constitutional experts on drafting a set of proposals to be given to the Sri Lankan government sometime this month, the rebels have said. More than 60,000 people have been killed in bitter fighting in the past three decades. Four previous peace bids have ended in failure.
The opposition and President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who is elected separately and is a political rival of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, have repeatedly accused the government of ignoring what they said was an LTTE military buildup. “The current neglect of the security forces and the steep decline of the preparedness of the military is alarming,” Chandrika wrote in a letter sent to the prime minister earlier this month.
But Marapana said the military was aware of what the Tigers were doing. “We have the plans, we have the troops and we have the equipment if the need arises,” he said.
