Tamil peace bid falters

Press, 24 June 1986, Page 10

Tamil peace bid falters

Security forces killed five guerrillas and detained 61 Tamil suspects in searches in the Trim comalee and Batticaloa districts of Sri Lanka yesterday. The sweep followed Sunday’s bomb blast at a market in Kantalai, 30km from Trincomalee, which killed two people. The blast occured as the Tamil United Liberation Front (T.U.L.F.), a moderate political party, announced that,it would not attend a conference of recognised political parties called by the Presi-

dent, Mr Junius Jayewardene. Mr Jayewardene has said he would place before tomorrow’s conference a plan to decentralise power in an effort to end the conflict between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamils which has cost more than 3000 lives in the last three years. The plan envisages the setting up of elected provincial councils with a Chief Minister and a Board of Ministers appointed from the group commanding a majority in the council.

The councils would be set up first in Northern and Eastern Provinces, where most Tamils live, and in the other seven provinces later. The T.U.L.F. SecretaryGeneral, Mr Appapillai Amirthalingam, said in a letter to Mr Jayewardene that the party was staying away from the conference because of what he called large-scale massacres of innocent Tamils.

The decision to boycott the meeting was taken at a meeting of T.U.L.F. leaders in the Indian city of Madras, where they have been living in

self-imposed exile since wide-spread ethnic violence erupted in the island in July, 1983.

The main opposition Freedom Party, headed by a former Prime Minister, Mr Sirima Bandaranaike, has also said it would not attend the conference. But it plans to meet Mr Jayewardene earlier to discuss the plan. A third political party, the leftist Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (People’s United Front), said that it also was not attending the conference.