Sri Lanka to Negotiate If Terrorists Quit Armed Struggle
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Sydney — President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka, who intensified the fight against rebels over the past two years, said he will negotiate with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam if the group gives up its armed struggle.
“If the LTTE lays down arms at any moment, I am ready to work with them to achieve peace,” he told religious leaders in the capital, Colombo, according to a statement on the Defense Ministry’s Web site on Wednesday.
The LTTE said last September that any peace process must be based on a homeland for the Tamil people, in the same way the ethnic-Albanian majority in the former Serbian province of Kosovo gained independence. Tamils make up 11.9% of Sri Lanka’s 20 million people, according to the 2001 census.
“I do not wish at all to wage a war against the people of the country,” Mr. Rajapaksa told the religious leaders. “My determination is to defeat terrorism.”
