The global community is gravely concerned over the rising tide of violence in the Jaffna peninsula and calling for urgent talks between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers to de-escalate the conflict.

This message was conveyed to the LTTE’s Chief Negotiator and theoretician, Mr. Anton Balasingham when a high level Norwegian delegation, led by Mr. Erik Solheim, Minister of International Development, met him at his London residence Tuesday last week for three hours of discussions.

The meeting came a day after the Co-Chairs of the donor community (US, EU, Japan and Norway) criticised the LTTE for the ongoing violence in Jaffna, whilst urging the Sri Lankan government to restrain the paramilitaries waging a ‘shadow war’ against LTTE supporters and members.

“The Co-Chairs call on the LTTE to put an immediate end to their on-going campaign of violence and again urge the LTTE to demonstrate their commitment to the Ceasefire Agreement and the peace process,” a joint statement said.

“Failure to demonstrate a willingness to change would not be without serious consequences,” the statement said, without elaborating.

The Norwegian message was also reiterated by representatives of the quartet (except the US) who met with LTTE Political Wing leader Mr. S. P. Tamilselvan this weekend.

Head of the EU Delegation to Sri Lanka, Ambassador Julian Wilson, however insisted that Co-Chairs were 'committed' and 'impartial' with regards to promoting peace in Sri Lanka.

Mr. Solheim told Mr. Balasingham the international community favoured immediate talks between the parties in conflict in the implementation of the truce, without prolonging dispute over the venue.

The world community, Mr. Solheim pointed out, is alarmed at the sudden escalation in violence in Jaffna, which has the potential to break into a fully fledged conflict if it is not arrested in time.

Mr. Balasingham, while explaining the reality of the ground situation, blamed the Sri Lankan army of occupation for unleashing ruthless violence against university students and staff.

The armed forces are adopting high-handed repressive methods, utilising brutal force to suppress peaceful demonstrations by students and civilians, thereby generating public resentment and unrest in the northern city, Mr. Balasingham told the Norwegians.

The LTTE chief negotiator further explained that the non-implementation of some crucial obligations of the February 2002 ceasefire agreement was the main cause for the subversive violence in the Tamil homeland.

The Sri Lankan military’s intimidation, harassment and persecution of Tamils have increased manifold since the hardline General Sarath Fonseka became Chief of the Army, Mr. Balasingham explained.

The Norwegian delegation underscored the importance of resuming talks on the operative mechanism of the ceasefire without further delay.

Concious that Sri Lanka was insisting on a venue in Asia whilst the LTTE wanted talks to be held in Norway, Mr. Solheim pleaded that the venue should not be a major dispute for talks.

Mr. Tamilselvan told representatives of the Co-Chairs “the Tamil leadership is firm and will oppose Colombo’s effort on imposing geographical limitations and preconditions on the venue of talks on the … and thereby alienating the Liberation Tigers from European countries.”

Aceh rebels formally disbanded their armed wing on Tuesday, effectively ending their 30-year separatist insurgency against Indonesia in which up to 15,000 people have died.

The move paves the way for the guerrilla group to transform itself into a political party expected to make a strong showing in elections in April.

"The Acehnese national army, or the armed wing of the Free Aceh Movement, has demobilized and disbanded," said Sofyan Daud, a rebel commander.

"The Aceh national army is now part of civil society, and will work to make the peace deal a success."

"We are entering a political era now, we do not need weapons anymore," Daud said.

Efforts to end the civil war picked up pace in the aftermath of the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami. The rebels and the Indonesian government returned to the negotiating table saying they did not want to add to people''s suffering.

"Both sides immediately realized the catastrophe presented a unique opportunity to end the war," said Damien Kingsbury, senior lecturer at Australia''s Deakin University and an adviser to the rebels.

The tidal waves swept away more than 200,000 people in 12 countries, with Indonesia''s Aceh province bearing the brunt: more than 156,000 killed.

"After the dimension of the disaster became clear, we ordered our units to stop fighting and to help save lives," Bachtiar Abdullah, an exiled leader of the Aceh separatist movement, told the Associated Press.

He returned home this week after 25 years in Sweden.

The two sides made major concessions. The rebels gave up their long-held demand for independence and the government agreed to give the region limited self-government and control over 70 percent of the revenue from the province''s mineral wealth.

The government also offered amnesty to the rebels, freeing more then 1,400 from prisons all over Indonesia just two weeks ago.

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, after meeting Tuesday in Aceh with rebel representatives, renewed his government''s pledge to complete the withdrawal of its more than 24,000 troops from Aceh by year''s end.

So far, the deal has stuck. The rebels have finished handing in all their self-declared 840 weapons while the Indonesian military has withdrawn nearly 20,000 troops from the Sumatra island province.

A previous attempt to end the bloodshed collapsed in 2003, after the Indonesian military kicked out foreign observers and restarted combat operations against the rebels.

Social stigma, depression among widowers, increased alcohol use among teenagers are all highlighted in the voices of tsunami survivors that were captured in a series of "People''s Consultations" in Sri Lanka.

The 800 focus-group discussions that were carried out in 1,100 villages in the 13 affected districts in the island were conducted by the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the University of Colombo.

“The dialogues highlight that more women than men perished in the disaster, leaving an unprecedented number of widowers suffering from depression and stigma,” the report said.

“Many husbands who lost their wives on December 26 find it difficult to look after young children while also being sole breadwinners for their families.”

“In addition, the research reveals an increase of alcohol consumption among men and teenage boys, large numbers of absenteeism and a high number of dropouts recorded in schools in affected districts since the tsunami.”

“Some of the people affected by the tsunami are suffering from social stigma and many talk of being labeled as ''tsunami-karayo'' - tsunami fellows - or beneficiaries of the ''golden wave''.”

“The initial findings show that some communities are now divided over many issues and relationships amongst neighbors, relatives and friends have seen drastic changes in some places.”

"The old harmony of the village has disappeared and in its place, envy, greed and resentment have grown," the report says.

Sanaka Samarasinha, the Deputy Country Director of UNDP said the study “has been invaluable not only in identifying the needs of people affected by the tsunami and in informing them of their rights and duties, it has also provided the space for some of the most vulnerable people in the various communities to participate in the recovery and reconstruction of their own lives and livelihoods."

"It is now critical that effective steps are taken by all those involved in the tsunami recovery effort to follow up immediately on these findings. We must capitalize on our successes and address the challenges identified by the people themselves so that we don''t fail to meet the expectations raised through these consultations," he said.

On the issue of housing, there is consensus among people across the board that they should be consulted and involved in the rebuilding process. The initial feedback shows that some fear that stringent adherence to the buffer zone policy will aggravate the challenge of finding land for rebuilding, particularly in those districts where land is scarce to begin with.

A tsunami-affected community in a village located in the Galle district also reported that they feel kept in the dark about how the tsunami aid is being managed. "Frankly, we know very little about the mechanism being implemented on our behalf. We are keen to receive answers to these questions. Who gets what from whom? Who does what for whom? Have we got the freedom to know?" enquired a community member from Galle.

During the consultations, it appeared clearly that information sharing between the local communities and those involved in the recovery activities were vital to ensure the success of rebuilding back better. "Earlier, there was no mechanism to ensure that the village-level opinions got top-level authorities. This process has given us a voice and is helping us rebuild our lives," said Namal Lakshanta a fisherman from Beruwela in the South who lost his boat and livelihood in the tsunami and is now starting to rebuild his life.

"The government and others involved in relief, rehabilitation and recovery require people''s participation in order to make correct judgments about related policies and relief mechanisms," said Professor Lakshman Dissanayake, Director of the Colombo University Extension Centre, which jointly conducted the consultations with the Human Rights Commission.

Meanwhile, consultations with government, NGO and other reconstruction partners showed that the weight of delivering tsunami assistance fell squarely on the shoulders of the district administration, at a time when they were insufficiently prepared to cope with an effort of this magnitude. The consultations which are funded by Norway and Germany, include discussions with the relevant Government Agents (GAs), Divisional Secretaries (DS), line ministries and other government officials.

“These Consultations have allowed tsunami survivors to express their concerns and aspirations, thereby empowers them to map out their futures. It not only helped officials ascertain the needs, concerns and ideas of the affected, and share these findings with relevant development actors, the meetings also turned out to be an important way to disseminate information on critical issues and decisions to the affected communities.

One year after the tsunami, a majority of the half-million people whose homes were swept away in Sri Lanka by ocean waves are living in temporary shelter because new houses are being built too slowly.

Out of the 95,000 houses that were destroyed, only 2,500 have been rebuilt so far; another 46,000 are under construction. According to the World Bank, some 22,000 displaced families don’t know where their new homes will be located.

Could the government in Colombo have done better? While the bureaucracy could no doubt have worked more expeditiously, even the current speed of construction may be unsustainable because of the pressure it’s putting on wages and material costs.

Rising prices in the Indian Ocean island-nation have eroded the purchasing power of the paltry 250,000 Sri Lankan rupee ($2,450) grant given by the government - in four installments - to rebuild a destroyed house.

When aid organizations and donors build the houses, they are spending more money on fewer dwellings.

Cost escalation is a challenge in Galle, a former Dutch- Portuguese colony in southwestern Sri Lanka. The tsunami claimed two thousand lives in the district of about a million people. Television viewers worldwide were shocked by the harrowing images of the vacation train that was lifted off the track by the tidal waves and swept out into the sea, killing most of the 1,500 people on board. That happened near Galle.

A year later, construction workers are in demand in Galle. A mason now charges 600 rupees to 750 rupees a day; before the tsunami the rate hovered between 400 rupees and 450 rupees.

Sand and timber prices have risen, too. A discount on cement is insufficient and requires too much paperwork, says Ariff Ismail Mohamed, mayor of Galle. He estimates that aid groups and donors have rebuilt about 1,200 of the 8,000 houses damaged. The affected families have constructed another 1,000 houses.

Researchers Sisira Jayasuriya, Paul Steele and Dushni Weerakoon said in a study last month that Sri Lanka’s post- tsunami “cost blowouts,” or price increases of 30 percent to 40 percent, will “most certainly create funding gaps, make reconstruction tasks difficult and impose further strains on government fiscal expenditures.”

The International Monetary Fund’s Anne Krueger had anticipated just this. When the fund’s first deputy managing director visited Sri Lanka in January, officials were talking about constructing 80,000 houses in 2005, a 16-fold jump from the 5,000 dwellings that get built in the country annually.

“A chunk of the money set aside for” reconstruction, Krueger said in an October speech in San Antonio, “would go not in more houses built - or roads repaired, or whatever it is we’re looking at - but in rising costs as wages and raw materials prices.”

No one denies that Sri Lanka needed to act quickly to rebuild the two-thirds of its coastline raked by the tsunami.

At least 35,322 people were killed, and assets valued at $900 million were wiped out. In the affected areas, nine out 10 working men and women lost their sources of livelihood; three quarters of Sri Lanka’s fishing fleet was smashed up; 53 large hotels were damaged, many of them irreparably.

Amid the urgency, it was important for the Sri Lankan government to realize that the tsunami victims needed price and exchange rate stability as much as they needed timely aid. That’s where the authorities could have done more.

Between Dec. 26, 2004, when the tsunami struck, and Jan. 7, 2005, expectations of foreign-aid inflows into Sri Lanka caused the local rupee to rise 5.3 percent against the U.S. dollar, the strongest appreciation in that period for any Asian currency.

The sudden rise in the Sri Lankan rupee reduced the local purchasing power of dollar-denominated foreign aid. Sri Lanka’s central bank shouldn’t have allowed the currency to rise in the post-tsunami period. It should instead have used the inflows of foreign money to shore up its reserves.

Simultaneously, the government should have liberally imported labor and materials from neighboring India for the reconstruction effort. That would have helped keep local costs in check and eased upward pressure on the currency.

Rising costs are only one part of the story. The age-old ethnic tension between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities has also played a role in delaying reconstruction. The rivalry cast its shadow on aid distribution in the island’s north where the Tamil guerillas are in control.

The government’s reluctance to allow construction by the seaside, too, has slowed things down. The buffer-zone restrictions are unpopular because they’re pushing people farther from the sea than they want to go.

“Fishermen don’t want to live miles away from the source of their livelihood,” says Mohamed, Galle’s mayor.

As for masons demanding higher wages, the mayor says they would go hungry if they didn’t seek protection from inflation, which is currently hovering at more than 12 percent.

Small economies coping with disasters need to focus on macroeconomic stability, including firm inflation control.

Donors too have a responsibility. “However much we want to help in the wake of disasters, we need to bear in mind that there are capacity constraints,” IMF’s Krueger said. “There’s only so much that can be done in a short time.”

Andy Mukherjee is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.

This week marks the first anniversary of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami which killed 230,000 people, including over 30,000 Sri Lankans. The outpouring of international sympathy and assistance that followed the disaster was as impressive as the numerous individual and communal acts of courage and benevolence undertaken around the ocean’s rim. Hope sprang in the wake of the deadly waves. It came to fruition in Indonesia where a permanent peace deal is now being rolled out – though it remains to be seen whether the promise of a better future for the Acehnese will truly emerge. Not so in Sri Lanka which is instead on the road to war. The very real possibility of communal and ethnic harmony that only catastrophic tragedy can usher in was squandered by the Sinhala ruling elite which, barely had the waters receded, leapt to again marginalize the Tamils, Muslims and even border Sinhalese of the Northeast. International aid was blocked and diverted to the south. Aid from the Tamil Diaspora was also blocked and sometimes appropriated.

The Sri Lankan state was visibly overwhelmed by the disaster. But the shameless wrangling in Colombo about whether aid – and that’s international donations, not Sri Lanka’s own cash – should be shared with LTTE proved the durability of Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism once and for all. And the moralising about ‘one government’ that accompanied international vacillation ignored the state’s legacy in the Northeast– a decades long embargo, deliberate lack of investment and military administration. The crunch came, of course, with the P-TOMS, the stillborn, though internationally lauded, joint mechanism which was consigned to the dustbin last month after Sri Lanka’s new President took charge. Even the Sinhala people have been let down, as the Auditor General’s interim report outlined. Corruption, inefficiency and expansion of Sri Lanka’s patron-client networks has ensured little good, save that effected by NGOs and other non-state actors, has come about.

As far as the Tamils are concerned, the tsunami has rammed home a lesson we ought to have already learnt: we must manage our own affairs. Future threats stemming from nature’s compulsions or political exigencies cannot be adequately faced otherwise. In this regard, the tsunami built intangibles as it destroyed buildings and people. Tamils, local and Diaspora, came together as never before to alleviate suffering. The leadership of the LTTE proved invaluable in this endeavour. Our sense of being a nation has thus been strengthened, as have the administrative mechanisms to administer our homeland. Even as we remember the enormous loss of life in our homeland, we must resolve, to use that now clichéd expression, to build back better. We must, in short, prepare to take care of ourselves.

Amid seething tensions between the Tamil population and Sri Lankan security forces, the ceasefire continues to fray in a storm of landmines, grenades and gunfire. There have been clashes at sea and more extra-judicial killings on land. Amidst all these, there was a particularly vicious attack this week, the murder of Joseph Pararajasingham, MP. A veteran politician, he was associated most with his fearless championing of the human rights of his people and of the Tamil cause. As far as the Tamils are concerned, blame for his killing – like that of other sons of Batticaloa murdered this year, Kausalyan and Sivaram, - rests with the Sri Lankan state. The triggers may have been pulled by Tamil paramilitaries or intelligence agents, but it was in service of the state that the killings were executed. The contempt demonstrated for religious sentiments and common decency by those who unleashed a hail of bullets within the Batticaloa church – on Christmas Day, no less – speaks volumes of the nature of the state the Tamils must overcome to secure our freedom.

Mr. Pararajasingham’s killing ought to give the international community pause for thought. For too long those advocating the peace process have skirted around a problem that generations of Tamil political activists have repeatedly found: the Sinhala-Buddhist state cannot be reformed by the gentle pressures of global norms or international censure. Let us see – if matters do not overtake us first – whether the Sri Lankan state will find, let alone punish, those who strolled into a packed church in the middle of government-controlled territory, gunned down a prominent public figure and then made good their escape through streets thronged with Sri Lankan soldiers and police. We doubt it. But it might prove us wrong and give some credibility to the idiotic notion that the solution to the Tamil problem is reform of this Sinhala-Buddhist state and not its dismantling and the creation of a new or –better still - two new ones.

It is all very well to talk of peace. All Sri Lankan leaders, even as they turned the screws of oppression have talked of peace. The last President, Chandrika Kumaratunga was, so committed to peace, she even launched a bloody war against our people in its service. Her successor, Mahinda Rajapakse, is also chanting the same mantra – that he is for peace, for talks, for equality – that we have heard amid the gunfire for so long. But what, pray, is he going to talk about? He has already dismissed our very existence as a political entity, rejecting the concept of a Tamil homeland and nation. He has already ruled weakening of the unitary state with a vehemence that his subsequent obfuscation of ‘unitary’ and ‘united’ cannot mitigate. Notwithstanding this impenetrable impasse, the global community has been urging talks. We wonder, is it blind faith in the goodness of man or confidence that silent guns will suffice for their own interests to proceed that spurs such calls?

Immediate talks must be held, we are told, for the ceasefire to be stabilised. True, but what chance progress given prevailing sentiments? The problem, as many, including this newspaper, have become hoarse arguing, is the shadow war being waged by the state against the Liberation Tigers, their supporters and the wider Tamil cause. We repeatedly pointed out to no avail that the paramilitary problem, left unchecked, would destroy the peace process and ceasefire, in that order. We argued that the security implications of the state’s proxy war would eventually compel a robust response from the LTTE and if unchecked, a spiral of violence would be inevitable. Now that bloody dynamic is playing itself out.

Instead of taking concrete and meaningful steps to end the paramilitary campaign being waged by his military, President Rajapakse is pursuing international pressure to be brought to bear on the LTTE. But it is not a question of the LTTE’s will to peace, but that of its day-to-day security. The Tamils are thus bracing for a regrettable but, under the circumstances, inevitable escalation of the violence. The international community’s alarm, dismay and frustration is palpable. But if there is to be reversal of Sri Lanka’s inexorable slide towards the abyss, key states must bring pressure to bear on Colombo to unequivocally and unambiguously implement Clause 1.8 of the ceasefire.

Just a little at a time. That’s what Yasodha Natkunam keeps reminding herself one year after the massive Indian Ocean tsunami devastated her war-ravaged homeland.

Despite the renewed threat of civil war and the undelivered millions in aid, the Stanford University pathologist continues her crusade to bring 21st-century medical care to the isolated region of northern Sri Lanka, one person at a time.

She has brought a Sri Lankan student to Stanford - paying for his plane fare, putting him up at her Sunnyvale home - to teach him how to use the high-tech microscopes and other equipment that she delivered to the impoverished flatlands last spring during her first journey home in two decades.

With renewed political tension stalling Sri Lanka’s rebuilding efforts, Natkunam understands her project to upgrade the region’s rudimentary medical labs requires both urgency and patience.

“The effort will continue as planned, just a little at a time,” she said. “I am an eternal optimist.”

Her goal is to build the intellectual foundation for medical laboratories that can someday diagnose illnesses on the spot, saving lives.

The Mercury News accompanied Natkunam in March as she traveled combat-battered, one-lane roads to deliver five microscopes to primitive labs in the hot, insect-infested region of northern Sri Lanka. She negotiated past tense political checkpoints, assuring both sides in the country’s decades-long conflict that the sensitive equipment was intended for peaceful purposes.

Stanford and Scientific Instruments of Sunnyvale had donated the used microscopes, which cost about $25,000 apiece when new.

The microscopes have since been used to screen blood smears, identify malaria parasites and train students in Sri Lanka’s Tamil region.

But without pathologists and specially trained technicians, the microscopes are not being used to diagnose cancer, as Natkunam hoped. Instead, patients often don’t learn about their disease, are diagnosed too late or must travel hundreds of miles to the capital city of Colombo for treatment.

That’s becoming increasingly difficult. Escalating violence in recent months threatens a delicate cease-fire, and the government has declared a state of emergency that authorizes detentions and searches without warrants.

Promised aid money has been slow to trickle into the region, adding to Sri Lanka’s post-tsunami economic woes. Many still live in temporary shelters - single rooms with concrete floors, wooden walls and thatch roofs.

So Natkunam turned her attention to training Sri Lankan technicians here in the United States.

“Teaching a skill -- that’s something that can be passed onto others, and lead to good things,” said Natkunam, 40. “It is one way to make a difference.”

Her first student recently returned to Sri Lanka after spending months observing Stanford technicians prepare and diagnose diseased tissue specimens. The student, Suresh Kumar, a 35-year-old Tamil Sri Lankan, works at the government-run Jaffna General Hospital.

“Stanford made it possible to show him how a clinical lab works,” Natkunam said.

She hopes to bring another student to Stanford when she has enough money. Even that has been tough, though, because it is unsafe for potential students to travel and Sri Lanka’s political instability has complicated fundraising.

“I just do what I can do,” Natkunam said.

On the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, Natkunam was at home in Sunnyvale, watching television while making breakfast for her children, when she learned about the giant waves.

It had been 21 years since she last saw Sri Lanka. She left as a student, with an imminent civil war threatening her dream of practicing medicine. Her parents were successful government physicians, even though they are members of the Tamil ethnic minority.

In 1983 tensions with the Sinhalese majority were worsening. Eight classmates in Natkunam’s college class were missing or imprisoned. Many others had already fled.

The dream of returning to her homeland to rebuild a medical system had been playing in her mind for years. The tsunami, which killed about 35,000 Sri Lankans, was her push.

“When I saw the footage, I realized I was overdue to go back and start working to help,” she recalls.

Even before the tsunami, an economic embargo had blocked food, fuel and medicine in the northern Tamil region for years. Microscopes were basic, where they existed at all.

Natkunam knows Sri Lanka’s brightest hope lies in its 1 million exiles - like Natkunam and her parents - who had the wherewithal to escape years before. Now, she fears more fighting and more death could further complicate her plans.

Yet she yearns to bring more equipment to the region - and bring more students to Stanford, seeking donations for their plane tickets.

“There is a lot to do and there have been major setbacks,” she said, “but I’m very hopeful that we will make progress.”

In a country steeped in political murder and endemic violence, Joseph Pararajasingham stood like a beacon for the goodness, kindness and brotherhood that should mark the conduct of relationships between human beings. The Sri Lankan government and its armed forces will again attempt to exculpate themselves of responsibility for this heinous crime. But their excuses are starting to wear thin. Their protestations shall not and cannot be believed, as they had both the motive and the circumstances to perpetrate this sordid act and, of course they have previous history of gruesome murders carried out with impunity.

This killing is not the single dastardly act committed by a madman on the spur of the moment. It is a calculated act of political assassination of Tamil leaders carried out by the government and its unscrupulous surrogates to eliminate the leadership of the Tamil people and to cower them into subjugation.

The EU was quick to condemn the LTTE for Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar’s death without a scintilla of evidence and will, I hope, not be acquiescent in the death of Joseph Pararajasingham. The co-chairs of the Sri Lankan peace process will be complicit by their silence, if indeed they choose to do so, in encouraging the Sri Lankan government and its armed forces to terrorise and murder the Tamil civilian population in their homelands. Presently the Sri Lanka armed forces are carrying out a vicious campaign of murder and terror in Jaffna against unarmed civilians and university students. The co-chairs who have their representatives in the country, must know that the Sri Lankan government has unleashed this reign of terror upon the Tamils in contravention of all the provisions of the Ceasefire Agreement in order to subjugate them.

But while the co-chairs seem to want to rush into judgement whenever there is a complaint made by the Sri Lankan government and its Goebbelsian public relations organisations, they have done nothing at all to stop the Sri Lankan government from carrying out these attacks on the civilian population. Where is their moral authority and judgement? Why do they not ban the members of the Sri Lankan government and the armed forces from travelling to their countries? The Tamils have every right to ask themselves whether they should any longer depend on the co-chairs or Western governments to broker peace when they appear to have no sense of fair play or even-handedness in their approach.

The Sinhala Buddhist establishment has been toying with the Eelam Tamil nation, flirting with offers of federalism and equality, primarily for the benefit of the credulous Western governments that have abandoned their ethics or moral values and are willing to be used as pawns by Sri Lanka in their campaign to demonise the Tamil cause.

The Sri Lankan government will continue to play cat and mouse with the Tamils so long as they can use the co-chairs to their advantage. President Mahinda Rajapakse was prepared to jettison the Oslo accord on a federal constitution to win the presidential election, after exciting and exacerbating the massed ranks of extremist Buddhist monks and their febrile supporters to campaign against it.

The Sinhala masses and their political leaders have shown throughout the years that they will not brook any democratic campaign by the Tamils for their political rights. It is an exercise in total futility to depend on the Sinhala polity to negotiate and concede fundamental political rights to the Tamils. The Tamil nation has striven long and hard for a political concordat but the time has now come to tell the Sinhalese, the co-chairs and the world that we shall not stand idly by while our leaders are assassinated and our people terrorised.

An ever present component of the ongoing tensions in Sri Lanka’s restive east is the relationship between the island’s Muslim community and the Tamils – more specifically the Liberation Tigers. To many critics of the LTTE, the organisation is essentially hostile to the Muslim community to the point of chauvinism, a baseline assumption that is one of many underpinning the claim that its values are at odds with those espousing liberal democratic ones. Critics and opponents frequently point to the sometimes volatile relationship between the LTTE and the non-Tamil minorities residing within the Northeast to argue that the Tigers are not fit to govern. Sri Lankan propaganda routinely lays the blame for friction between Muslims and Tamils on LTTE provocations. The LTTE instigates communal violence, the argument goes, to advance its ethno-centric agenda.

A closer inspection of the relationships between the LTTE, Tamils and Muslim communities of the Northeast suggests this line of thought is an inaccurate representation of ongoing dynamics. If analysts approach the Tamil-Muslim question without a prejudicial assumption of inflexible LTTE hostility to the Muslims, then an alternative hypothesis becomes increasingly plausible. The dynamics around the Tamil-Muslim question in Sri Lanka has, for a long time, been insufficiently examined. And this has, in a perverse paradox, fuelled violence and communal tension.

Undeniably, relations between the Tamil and Muslim communities have been strained over the past few decades. The worst inter-communal animosity existed in the early to mid-nineties. The state created armed Muslim paramilitary groups which it utilized to fuel communal violence and open a third front in the bloody war. The LTTE’s counter-violence led to a spiral which devastated the fabric of communal relations. In a particular low point of communal relations, the LTTE expelled several thousand Muslims from Jaffna. The movement has since apologised for this infamous action and urged Muslims to resettle without fear. However there are other vested interests preventing this, a point returned to below.

One central – albeit changing and changeable - aspect of Tamil-Muslim relations that is often ignored amidst the critical and narrow focus on the Tigers are the sentiments of ordinary Tamils and Muslims towards each other. Communal animosities pre-date the LTTE and have continued separately, though clearly not independently, of the LTTE’s armed struggle. Apart from conflict-related violence, local resource competitions, state-sponsored (and violent) colonisation in the Northeast, and discrepancies in economic and other opportunities have all contributed to communal hostilities.

However, the fundamental question invoked today ought to be who, exactly, benefits from instability and communal tension between the two communities, and who does not.

To begin with, the LTTE’s interests, not least given its undisguised ambitions to govern the Northeast, lie in promoting stability and winning legitimacy amongst the residents of the region it is aspiring to administer. Efforts to fit the LTTE within the role of ‘conflict entrepreneur’ is no longer compatible with the organization’s position as one of the two state-like actors on the island. If it was a conflict entrepreneur as is argued, LTTE would unleash violence to promote instability and tensions to compel (Tamil) victims of the resultant turmoil to rally to the organization for protection. However a counter supposition could be the organization has grown to state like functionality and its imminent ambitions to govern means it prefers cultivate legitimacy to its rule in the target area. A close examination of the conduct of the LTTE and its associated organisations since the February 2002 ceasefire reveals a sustained effort in this regard to rebuild bridges with the Muslim community.

The most revealing – and undeniably most important – aspect is the LTTE’s response to outbreaks of communal violence. Senior LTTE political wing officials meet promptly with Muslim community and religious leaders to discuss and resolve the issue and to jointly urge calm and restraint on all sides. Contrary to the emotive and provocative rhetoric deployed by government officials and some Muslim political leaders, LTTE officials strive to avoid exacerbating tensions.

On a wider note, Tamil charitable organizations such as the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO) also engage in projects in predominantly Muslim areas. The TRO, for example, has been involved in post-tsunami building shelters and homes in Muslim dominated parts of Amparai, Pottuvil and Kalmunai. There are also stirrings of cross-ethnic civil society relations: the TRO has donated computers and other material to Muslim Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), for example. This is not merely a question of assimilating Tamil-speaking Muslims. A notable effort has been to encourage the Muslim religion and identity in the Northeast. The TRO, for example, stepped in to fund the reconstruction of Ladies Arabic College, even as the Sri Lankan state ignored the destruction of the iconic institution.

In many ways, last year’s tsunami was an acid test for the LTTE’s conduct towards other communities within its areas of control – as was the Sri Lankan state’s. The results have been visible to both international and domestic audiences – and have been starkly different for both actors – but are frequently discounted by analysts who begin by assuming ongoing hostility and then setting out to find the evidence to fit, ignoring that which does not. It is not clear why, for example, the LTTE media (local and especially Diaspora) saw fit to highlight the acute damage in Amparai when raising the case for Northeastern suffering – as opposed to the state which blanked out the Northeast and concentrated on highlighting the south.

Within three days of the tsunami – even as Colombo blocked aid from reaching the Northeast - the Liberation Tigers sent six lorries to Amparai from Kilinochchi with emergency supplies and a lorry load of medicine along with fifty doctors for relief operations. As the death toll in that coastal areas rose steeply, LTTE cadres crossed enmasse into government-controlled areas to undertake relief efforts. As the LTTE’s top commander in the region, Colonel Banu told the gathered Tamil press, “we are not looking at this disaster in terms of Tamils, Muslims or Sinhalese. Our concern is only with people hit by the tsunami.”

Compare the speed and scale of the LTTE’s response to the tsunami with that of the Sri Lankan state which is unproblematically taken, in contrast to the LTTE, to be seeking to build communal harmony. Two months after the waves struck thousands of Muslims demonstrated in the main coastal towns of the Amparai against the government for denying them tsunami aid.

A close examination of the conduct of the state and its institutions also challenges the assumption the state unquestioningly prefers communal harmony. Its role in resource competition is a case in point. The diversion of water from the Kantalai tank in Trincomalee away from Tamil and Muslim farmers toward Sinhalese farmers is a typical instance of resource manipulation undertaken with the knowledge that communal tensions would emerge and last. Tolerance of the provocative erection of unauthorised Buddhist statues in Trincomalee earlier this year and the subsequent civil unrest are further evidence state acceptance of communal antagonism in multi-ethnic regions. (The resulting civil strife provided the government with the cover to re-induct 2,000 troops into the port town under the guise of maintaining the peace, even though the ceasefire explicitly forbade such repositioning).

The pressing question now is however, who benefits from the violence and terror being stoked between Tamils and Muslims in the east? If the LTTE’s ambitions to govern the Northeast compel conduct to garner local and international legitimacy, then those opposed to the LTTE’s ambitions undoubtedly benefit from the frustration of its efforts to secure legitimacy.

Undoubtedly the overwhelmingly Sinhala armed forces are amongst those who do so. Apart from the regular redeployment of troops ‘compelled’ by potential communal clashes, the provocative construction of new bases are rationalised on the same basis: rising violence against the Muslim community in Batticaloa has, for example, been put forward as the justification of the establishment of the Navy’s first base in that district.

A glimpse into the role of the armed forces in instigating communal violence emerged last month when two cadres of an Army-backed paramilitary group defected to the LTTE. What was particularly revealing was the role of three ministers – an anti-LTTE Tamil, a Muslim and a Sinhalese – in arranging support and logistics for the Karuna Group.

On the other hand, there is the Muslim political leadership. Critics of the LTTE in the region often give credence to the inflammatory rhetoric of Muslim politicians – without subjecting the latter’s objectives and actions to the same critical scrutiny as the former’s.

At once stage, as part of its efforts to build communal stability and harmony, the LTTE briefly attempted to collaborate with the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) in the mistaken assumption that the party and its leader, Rauf Hakeem, would both be able to speak unequivocally for his community and enjoy its confidence. However, it subsequently became increasingly apparent that the Muslim polity was deeply divided and embroiled in the patron-client politics and the SLMC-LTTE pact disintegrated, helped on the way by a relentless anti-LTTE tirade from Mr. Hakeem, around whom the SLMC, once the island’s largest Muslim party, was coming apart under internal tensions.

The LTTE has also been criticized by other Muslim political leader such as Mr. M. S. S Hisbullah and Ms. Ferial Ashraff. However, in a stark indication of their concern for communal harmony, both opted to share a platform with the ultra-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Buddhist supremacist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU).

Interestingly, almost all leading Muslim politicians have opted to either back or remain silent on state-backing for the Karuna paramilitary group in the East - despite the fact that many of the hardships they vociferously accuse the LTTE of inflicting on the Muslim people having been inflicted during Karuna’s unusually long (17 years) term as LTTE commander of Batticaloa-Amparai.

A number of the major Muslim politicians have also been implicated in the misuse of tsunami rehabilitation funds. The Auditor General’s report criticized both state and local bureaucracies for widespread misappropriation of funds and the incompetence. Evidently Muslim leaders associated with the state, much like Tamil paramilitary organizations with political veneers, rely on patron-client networks developed through the (mis) use of state funds and resources to maintain their standing.

Conversely, the LTTE its efforts to assist the Muslim community have resulted in a productive network of alliances with local community leaders. A number of them have rallied round the organization over the past few months in the face of vehement accusations of anti-Muslim chauvinism. “Some sinister forces are spreading unfounded allegation in the South that LTTE is obstructing resettlement,” said Moulavi L. Shakil of the Muslim People’s Office in Jaffna, last month.

More pointedly, the Jaffna Masjid Mohamedia Jumma Mosque Committee declared in a press statement released a couple of months earlier: “we publicly appeal to the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress leadership not to use the resettled Muslim internally displaced families as pawns for its political purposes. If SLMC attempts to hold their general meeting in Jaffna we will launch a protest campaign on the same day.”

The point is simple: continuing Tamil-Muslim violence provides some Muslim political parties, including the SLMC, with a convenient bete-noir (the LTTE – and the Tamils) against which they can rally Muslim sentiments. In particular such violence and antagonism allows these actors to step forward as self-appointed defenders of Muslim interests against the ‘chauvinistic’ Tigers.

The theme has been appropriated by the Sri Lankan state and inadvertently boosted by the international community in demanding the inclusion of a ‘third’ negotiating panel at Norwegian-brokered talks to resolve the island’s ethnic conflict. The LTTE’s argument that Muslim interests must be catered for when substantive issues of representation are taken up and that would be a suitable point to ethnicise the talks was summarily rejected without consideration – again on the unquestioned assumption the movement is inherently chauvinistic.

However, there are inescapable signs, even if many analysts choose to ignore them, that this tension is becoming harder to sustain. The most promising sign of improving inter-communal relations between Tamils and Muslims and, in particular, the LTTE and Muslims, was the Centre for Policy Alternative’s survey last week which suggested that over fifty percent of Muslim respondents to their poll backed the establishment of the LTTE’s Interim Self-Governing Administration (ISGA) in the North-East.

In summary, the argument that the LTTE is determined to maintaining a state of tension in order to garner further support from Tamil community is incompatible with the organisation’s actions and policies and with unfolding dynamics. Were these to be reassessed against the LTTE’s political ambitions, its policies are demonstrably far more coherent in terms of building and improving Tamil-Muslim relations. The strategic value to the opponents of the LTTE of disrupting its efforts is also clearly apparent. The primary threat from state-sponsored paramilitaries is not their ability to threaten the LTTE militarily, but rather their capability to destabilize communal relations in the areas in which they are operating and thus derail this central pin in LTTE’s political ambitions.

UN urges Sudan, Uganda action

Warning that the lives of millions of Africans are at stake, the UN humanitarian chief urged stepped-up international efforts Monday to tackle worsening conflicts in Sudan and Uganda, and severe food shortages in Zimbabwe and southern Africa.

Jan Egeland appealed for an expanded security force to stop rapes, killings, burning and looting in Sudan’s Darfur region that is spilling across the border to Chad.

He called for international efforts to curb the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and southern Sudan, and he said Zimbabwe’s government must stop further evictions and allow its people to receive international aid.

‘More is currently at stake in terms of lives saved or lost in Africa than on any other continent,’ Egeland said in a briefing to the UN Security Council. ‘As humanitarian workers, we cannot accept that so many lives are lost every year on this continent to preventable diseases, neglect and senseless brutality.’

The UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs said the international community must demonstrate its ‘humanity’ by funding a more ambitious development and humanitarian agenda. He expressed hope that new African Union initiatives and additional resources pledged by the powerful Group of Eight major industrialized nations would result in major changes.

‘Humanitarian aid cannot be an alibi for unwillingness to address the root causes of conflict,’ he said. ‘The greatest contribution we can make to addressing humanitarian crises in Africa is determined, energetic and sustained efforts to bring an end to conflict and injustice that cause so much suffering in Africa.’ (AP)

Colombia, ELM talk – in Cuba

Colombia’s government and the nation’s second-largest rebel group ended nearly a week of cordial talks in Cuba on Wednesday with an agreement to set an agenda for formal peace negotiations, a move both sides called significant.

‘This commits us as the government to continue moving ahead,’ said Colombian peace commissioner Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government’s envoy, as the discussions wrapped up in Havana.

Antonio Garcia, the second-in-command of the National Liberation Army or ELN, said his group was ‘pleased with this first step. This recognizes years of work, and could show a change in the path taken by Colombia.’

The fact that both sides have committed to more face-to-face meetings in Havana at the end of January was ‘transcendental,’ Restrepo said.

Diplomats from Spain, Norway and Switzerland monitoring the talks praised the ‘exploratory’ meeting as a step forward that could lead to a new round of negotiations.

Both parties declined to provide details of the issues that would be tackled in the agenda-setting meetings. But Garcia said the discussion of deep social and economic changes in Colombia would have to be central to any peace process, and it was assumed the government would demand some sort of cease-fire agreement.

Colombia’s triangular conflict involving government troops, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary fighters kills more than 3,000 people each year, most of them civilians.

Iranians, EU agree to further talks

Iranian and European negotiators tentatively agreed Wednesday to meet next month, signalling a possible new start to negotiations to restrain the Tehran regime’s nuclear program and reduce fears it is trying to make atomic bombs

Still, diplomats conceded no progress was made on the main issue - Iran’s insistence on its right to enrich uranium, which is a process that has peaceful uses but also can produce the fissile core of nuclear warheads.

Weeks of tension have diminished hopes they will make headway in defusing the crisis, with declarations from Iran that the Holocaust is a myth and Israel should be wiped out, and a European Union accusation on Tuesday that Tehran has serially violated human rights at home.

‘We repeated our positions and the Iranians repeated theirs,’ said Stanislas de Laboulaye, the senior negotiator for France, representing the European Union at the negotiations along with Britain and Germany.

‘Both sides set out their positions in an open and frank manner ... (and) agreed to consult with their respective leaderships with a view of holding another round of talks in January,’ de Laboulaye said.

Javad Vaidi, the senior Iranian negotiator who handles international affairs for the Supreme National Security Council, described Wednesday’s session as giving both parties ‘the opportunity to see the other side’s point of view.’

Israel bans Jerusalem vote over Hamas

Israel said on Wednesday it would ban East Jerusalem Arabs from voting in a Palestinian election next month if militant Islamic group Hamas takes part – a move Palestinian officials said could delay the vote.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel will not allow voting in Jerusalem for the January 25 poll because Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruction and has spearheaded a suicide bombing campaign, is running for the first time.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ aides talked openly about the possibility of postponing the elections that pit the ruling Fatah Party against the increasingly popular Islamic militant group Hamas, citing Israel’s threat to ban voting in Jerusalem.

Postponing or even cancelling the elections could serve the interests of Abbas and the Israelis, but both sides dismissed speculation they were in this together.

Speaking to the AP from Beirut, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said the Jerusalem issue could be resolved in a ‘compromise among Palestinian factions rather than postponing elections.’ He said if Abbas puts off the elections, it would be an admission that Hamas would win.

Hamas’s corruption-free reputation and extensive charity network mean its popularity is rising among Palestinians. Its strong showing in the first three rounds of municipal elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, winning in several major cities including the Fatah stronghold of Nablus, has prompted concern about a Hamas victory in Israel and abroad.

300 killed in Chad clashes

Government forces clashed with army deserters in an eastern border town of Chad, killing about 300 militants in the biggest recent offensive against rebels, officials said Monday. Five soldiers and three civilians also died in Sunday’s raid to retake control of Adre, 620 miles east of the capital of N’djamena, the army said in a statement read on state-owned Radio Chad.

The clash was with two rebel groups - the Rally for Democracy and Freedom and the Foundation for Change, Unity and Democracy, the army said.

Communication Minister Hourmadji Moussa and the army said some 300 rebels were killed, although the claim couldn’t be independently verified. Representatives of the rebels were not immediately available for comment.

If true, the death toll would be the largest in recent fighting between government forces and military deserters reportedly seeking to overthrow President Idriss Deby.

Scores of soldiers deserted several military camps in October and have since regrouped in eastern Chad, near the border with Sudan’s volatile western region of Darfur. Joined by former high-ranking government officials - including two nephews of Deby - some of the rebels have formed the Foundation for Change, Unity and Democracy.

Since October, soldiers have fought intermittently with rebels, who at times have crossed into Sudan to escape army attacks. (AP)

Fraud allegations, threatened boycotts and a vote along rigid ethnic and religious lines are robbing last week’s Iraqi national parliamentary election of its credibility as a building block in democracy plans for the Middle East.

The initial results showed powerful support for the leading Shiite Muslim religious alliance, and suggested that the country’s splintered politics has coalesced into a few large political groups divided along ethnic and religious lines.

Election officials announced unofficial results on Monday from more than half of Iraq’s 18 provinces and Baghdad, the largest city, showing the Shiite alliance leading overwhelmingly in central and southern Iraq.

And, as expected, a coalition of Kurds dominated the north, while votes from the mainly Sunni Muslim western provinces have not been reported.

However Sunni Arab parties and secular political groups claimed that results were inaccurate after initial counts in the capital, Baghdad, showed nearly 59 percent of the vote going to the Shi’ite United Iraqi Alliance.

With almost 90 percent of the ballots counted, the Shi’ite grouping appeared to come in first, with more than 60 percent of the total votes cast. The Sunni block, meanwhile, represented primarily by the umbrella National Accord Front, trailed behind with only 19 percent.

The preliminary returns pointed towards an Iraqi government that would be led for the next four years by a conservative Shiite religious alliance that has close ties to Iran, presiding over a country hardening into three mutually suspicious political blocs.

On 15 December, voters cast ballots for 275 elected seats in the national assembly. The elected government, which will serve a four-year term, will in turn choose a president and two deputies from among its members.

The results showed that other small slates did not appear likely to gain representation in the first round of allocating seats for the National Assembly even though the intricate system for doling out 45 of the 275 assembly seats is designed to reward small parties.

It seems the religious Shiites are assured of dominating the new National Assembly, but not of the two-thirds majority needed for a series of major decisions on the shape of the new government or the fate of the new Iraq.

It is an outcome that signals a repeat of the protracted post-poll horse-trading that robbed the fractured country of most of the momentum won by the conduct of its first democratic elections in January.

Adnan al-Dulaimi, head of the Sunni Arab alliance the Iraqi Accordance Front, listed several complaints, including voting centers failing to open, shortages in election materials and reports of multiple voting and forgery.

The election commission, known as the IECI, has said it received 1,250 complaints about violations during the Dec. 15 elections, 25 of which it described as serious. But the commission says it does not expect the complaints will change the overall result, to be announced in January.

"Partial results in the capital show that the election was unfair because Sunnis were expected to have many more votes," said Adnan al-Dulaymi, a leader of the Sunni coalition. "We demand a new poll in the capital because this one was fraudulent."

"International organisations and the United Nations should support the call for another election before a revolt breaks out," al-Dulaymi declared.

"These are not true results. These are forged," charged Khalaf Elayan, secretary-general of the National Dialogue Council, one of the main Sunni parties. "We have our numbers that we got through our observers and they differ from those. We have a lot of support in Baghdad. The numbers they gave cannot be true."

Representatives of secular Shi’ite former prime minister Iyad Allawi and two major Sunni Arab groups, the Islamist-led Iraqi Accordance Front and the secular Iraqi Unified Front, along with other groupings, met this week to coordinate.

"We all agreed to contest and reject the results of the election," said Allawi aide Thaer al-Naqib. "We want the Electoral Commission dissolved and the election rerun."

"We will take to the streets if necessary," he told Reuters. "We might even not take up our seats in the new parliament and so any new government would be illegitimate."

Unified Front leader Saleh al-Mutlak said they would take their complaints not only to the Electoral Commission but also the Arab League, European Union and United Nations.

Other Sunni Arab leaders have warned of a resumption of rebel violence if leaders whom they accuse of being puppets of Shi’ite, non-Arab Iran keep power.

Sunni rebels, whose informal truce helped increase turnout as insurgents pitched for a voice in the new, full-term legislature, warned they would intensify attacks if the Shi’ite Alliance held on to the lion’s share of power.

"The resistance will intensify and ... and much blood will be spilt if Iran’s agents gain power," said Majeed al-Gaood, who says he speaks for rebel groups, from neighbouring Jordan.

Electoral Commission chief Hussein al-Hindawi told a news conference that 10.9 million voters took part on Thursday, putting national turnout at 70 percent, much higher than the 58 percent who participated in January’s ballot, when many in the Sunni Arab minority stayed away from the polls.

Chinese, Indian oil firms collaborate

The leading oil companies of China and India have agreed to jointly acquire a Canadian firm’s petroleum interests in Syria in their first collaborative venture.

China National Petroleum Corp. and India’s Oil and Natural Gas Corp. – both state-owned – have agreed to pay 676 million Canadian dollars ($578 million) for the Syrian assets of Petro-Canada.

The companies are buying Petro-Canada’s interest in the Al Furat Petroleum Co., a joint venture with state-owned Syrian Petroleum Co. and Syria Shell Petroleum Development B.V.

The announcement comes as China and India, longtime rivals, are aggressively expanding their efforts to secure foreign energy supplies for their booming economies, sometimes in direct competition with one another.

The Syrian government still needs to approve the takeover of the assets, which represent forecast 2006 production of about 58,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, Petro-Canada said.

As of the end of 2004, the assets accounted for 66.3 million barrels of proved reserves before royalties, or 24.2 million barrels after royalties, according to Petro-Canada.

The company had been looking to sell the Syrian assets since the summer and rumors had been circulating that the properties could fetch much more in the current high-price environment for energy properties.

Beijing and New Delhi have been trying to build closer political and commercial relations after decades of hostility between the nuclear-armed Asia giants. (AP)

India defends nuclear deal with US

India Wednesday defended a controversial new civilian nuclear cooperation deal with the United States and rejected demands by American critics that New Delhi accept curbs on its atomic weapons program.

Ahead of talks with senior US officials, Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran said he was bringing ‘‘ideas’’ to address a centerpoint of the July 18 deal – India’s commitment to place nuclear facilities associated with its civilian energy program under international inspection.

But he declined to give details, including how India would treat its Canadian-supplied Cirus nuclear plant, which experts say was intended for peaceful use but was diverted for military purposes.

‘‘We are not talking here about a capping of India’s strategic (nuclear weapons) program. We are not talking here about a fissile material cutoff’’ but about how to meet India’s burgeoning energy needs, he told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.

Saran, who later met Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said a fissile material cutoff halting India’s production of bomb-grade nuclear fuel, and other changes suggested by nonproliferation advocates, would be ‘‘deal-breakers.’’

The agreement, which must be approved by the US Congress, would give India access to nuclear technology, including fuel and reactors, that it has been denied for 25 years.

For more than two decades, Washington led the fight to deny India access to nuclear technology because it rejected the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and developed nuclear weapons. But President George W. Bush, aiming to build an alliance with the world’s largest democracy, reversed that approach. (Reuters)

Bribery allegations dog Indian MPs

An Indian TV station said Tuesday it secretly filmed parliamentarians asking for kickbacks for promoting development projects, days after another channel filmed politicians taking cash for questions in parliament.

Seven MPs were involved in the latest scandal, including three from the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and one from the ruling Congress party, which heads the coalition government. The other three are from regional parties.

Earlier this month, a Web site and TV news channel filmed another 11 MPs apparently accepting money for asking questions in parliament from journalists posing as representatives of a fictitious lobbying group.

Six of the MPs are from the BJP, three from the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and one each from the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). All four parties immediately suspended the men from their parliamentary wings following the expose and parliament asked the men not to attend the houses until the matter is resolved.

Analysts say corruption among politicians and the huge bureaucracy in the world’s largest democracy is widespread and sting operations are just the tip of the iceberg. A survey by a newspaper this month showed 98 percent of Indians thought politicians corrupt.

In 2001, a news portal secretly filmed public and military officials accepting cash to swing a fake arms deal. It led to the then defence minister quitting as well as the BJP president.

External affairs minister Natwar Singh quit this month, after earlier being suspended, following his naming in the Volcker report on the Iraq food-for-oil scandal.

Former judge to probe Chennai stampede

India’s Tamil Nadu government has appointed former Justice A Raman, a retired judge of the Madras High Court, as a one-member inquiry commission to look into Sunday’s stampede.

At least forty-three people were killed in the stampede Sunday morning at a cyclone relief center in Chennai, capital of southern India’s Tamil Nadu, NDTV reported. Another 37 people were injured in the accident and have been sent to hospital.

The Raman-led commission will investigate the arrangements made for issue of relief material tokens at the centre and submit its report in two months.

The accident took place at the flood relief camp in a government high school in south Chennai at 4:30 a.m. Sunday, where nearly 3,000 people had gathered to collect relief materials, when people started running for shelter in a heavy downpour.

But other reports also said that the accident was triggered by a rumor that Sunday will be the last day for the distribution of food coupons.

Tamil Nadu has suffered torrential rains and floods in the past month, evacuating around 175,000 people from their home. The government has opened about 150 relief centers to distribute foods and other relief material.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha announced that the family of each victim will receive 100,000 rupees (about 2,272 US dollars) as compensation.(Xinhua).

Student and staff from Jaffna University, a venerated institution amongst Sri Lanka’s Tamils, this week lead protests against occupying military force. The violence these invoked left several people hospitalised and tensions seething.

The most serious encounter was on Tuesday when, for the first time since the military onslaught on the northern city in 1995, the academic institution’s grounds were invaded by armed troops.

Jaffna hospital staff said it was the worst incident of its kind since the February 2002 ceasefire. One had been confirmed shot and wounded and 14 others were injured.

University employees and students fled as troops, firing their weapons, advanced into the grounds. Others took cover. Jaffna newpapers reported then the Army began attacking people on the ground.

‘‘A police vehicle arrived at the university’s Ramanathan Road, causing fear among students due to the previous day’s incidents,” Vice Chancellor of Jaffna University, S Mohanadas, said referring to the security forces confronting students enroute to protest the rape and murder of a Tamil women by suspected Sri Lanka Navy personnel.

‘‘The SLA began to open fire for no reason, making students defend themselves by throwing stones at the vehicle. The vehicle left, and moments later a large number of police and SLA armed vehicles forcefully entered the university,” Prof. Mohanadas said.

‘‘The students who were on campus were attacked, and one of our lecturers was also attacked and arrested.”

‘‘They (troops) shot at us,” University of Jaffna management student Senthil Ratneswaran told Reuters in an overcrowded local hospital, a suspected bullet fragment still in his back.

‘‘Some fell onto the road to save themselves and they were kicked. They are trying to... instigate the LTTE to move towards war.”

Students said the army had also fired rounds at the main Jaffna university campus, showing Reuters what they said were the spent bullet casings, but the army said there was no firing - although troops kept up a high profile presence.

‘‘There was no need for them to come here today,” said 25-year-old economics student Jasinthan Kamalanathan. ‘‘They come to harass and provoke us. They want the people to restart the war.”

Troops arrested Manickavasagar Ilampirayan, UJ lecturer and a student, Gowri Senthooran. No reasons were given for the arrests, but Tamil political activists have been attacked and murdered in recent months.

Prof Mohanadas said the recent outbreak of violence can be attributed to Colombo’s new policy decisions and the recent appointment of hardliner Lt. Gen. Fonseka as Army chief.

‘‘This is a worst form of politically motivated military tactic,” he said, after he himself was beaten up by military forces.

‘‘While there were attacks on the University students in the past, the university teachers and professors were never attacked before,” an editorial from Eezhanathan, a Jaffna paper, stated.

The violence was initially sparked Sunday when troops confronted students enroute to join protests against Army occupation sparked Saturday by the discovery of a local woman’s raped and mutilated body in a well near a Sri Lankan Navy base.

On Sunday students from the University of Jaffna attempted to travel to Punguduthivu to and were forcibly stopped by troops, who then began attacking civilians in the area.

Troops then forced their way into the offices of the International Tamileelam Student Union, and an hour later, international truce monitors arrived to resolve the situation.

However residents reported a resurgence of attacks after the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) left the area.

The violence continued Monday as university students and professors marched to the offices of the SLMM to protest the injustices stemming from Jaffna’s military occupation

Demonstrators were scheduled to deliver an appeal to the SLMM on Monday, protesting the heightening attacks by soldiers on civilians. However, the protestors were stopped en route to the SLMM office, as soldiers began beating up protestors.

Journalists from Tamil papers were also beaten up, and their equipments and cameras were destroyed.

University Vice Chancellor Professor C. Mohanadas, Jaffna MP S. Kajendran, Dean of Arts Professor R. Sivachandran, student leader of the medical faculty T. Kandeepan were also among those severely beaten by SLA troops. Several students were among those hospitalized for injuries.

‘‘Our university community not only includes our campus, but it encompasses our technical college, civilian homes, shops, etc. As we are a part of this greater community, we unanimously decided to temporarily suspend classes. … The students who are living in our dormitories have returned home,” Prof. Mohanadas said.

The Vice Chancellor has written to the government with three demands: ‘‘To remove the Sri Lankan military from the university areas; To stop interference with university students and To stop the military’s threatening presence in the areas where students live.”

However, he said, ‘‘No progress has yet been made in de-escalating tension in the Jaffna district.”

Students at Vavuniya campus also boycotted classes Tuesday to show their support for their fellow students in Jaffna. Students at Eastern University in Batticaloa also cancelled classes to protest the attacks on fellow students.

Jaffna, once the epicentre of Sri Lanka’s protracted ethnic conflict, is once again gripped by violence. But amid escalating attacks on security forces, there is a new dimension of unrest: violent protests by civil society groups.

Long simmering animosity against Sri Lankan security forces’ continued occupation of civilian places, including homes, schools and places of worship, has resulted in sporadic rioting against troops in the past two years. It has also fuelled the massive ‘Pongu Thamil’ demonstrations across the northeast, attended by tens of thousands in each location.

But in the past month, several protests in Jaffna led by students and other civilian groups have turned violent. In the past few days protests by students have provoked clashes with Sri Lankan troops and police.

Tensions are rising. On streets bearing the scars of past bombs and shells, soldiers stood with assault rifles and sticks, some obscuring their faces with black bandannas, Reuters reported.

On Monday troops and protesters clashed in Jaffna with one person shot and wounded and each side accusing the other of trying to provoke further violence.

The army said it had fired into the air after protesters hurled stones at checkpoints. Protesters said troops attacked a peaceful demonstration against army brutality and beat up lecturers and students.

The injured included senior university staff who said they had been beaten with sticks and rifle butts. The army said it had no details on anyone being shot.

Amid continuing attacks on military personnel and positions, the clashes between demonstrators and security forces has heightened tensions across the peninsula, as have intensified patrolling and cordon-and-search operations by troops.

Heavily armed soldiers aggressively searched numerous villages throughout the Jaffna district, including Mandaitivu, Kacchai and Kodikamam in Thenmaradchy, Ariyalai in Jaffna, Myilankadu in Valilkamam North, Erlalai North and Mandan in Vadamarachy last week.

Residents said they were threatened with dire consequences if they involved themselves in the protests or other actions against the military.

Some youths were taken to military stations and detained for questioning, without their families being given any reasons, inevitably raising anxious memories of the times of the ‘disappearances’ during times of conflict.

On Wednesday, Sri Lanka’s newly elected President Mahinda Rajapakse called a meeting with Tamil parliamentarians to discuss the crisis.

The inconclusive meeting with the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) was also attended by the new head of the Army, Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka, who bluntly rejected the MPs’ protests and said that his troops would take measures to impose order in the troubled region.

On Tuesday, Sri Lanka’s parliament was briefly suspended on Tuesday as the TNA MPs shouted slogans demanding troop pull-backs from the occupied north.

R. Sampanthan accused the army of opening fire on peaceful crowds around Tamil-dominated Jaffna before heading to the centre of the chamber with the rest of his party’s MPs and shouting slogans.

"Incidents of this nature have been systematically used against Tamil civilians as a weapon of war," he said, demanding that the government "withdraw all armed forces from all civilian inhabited areas".

The SLA says it only fired into the air on Monday to break up a student demonstration it says was LTTE-backed and stoning checkpoints. The protesters said the troops attacked without provocation. Doctors said at least one man was shot and wounded.

Last Saturday SLA soldiers attacked rickshaw drivers at Irupalai junction, on the Point Pedro road. Troops opened fire to disperse drivers for using the junction for business. As drivers fled, one rickshaw and another civilian’s motorbike were abandoned, and were appropriated to a nearby SLA camp. Nearby businesses closed as the region remained tense.

Following this, drivers reported the incident to the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM). However, the next morning, auto-rickshaw drivers were again attacked at the same junction in retaliation for complaining to the SLMM about the harassment they experienced.

Another driver was attacked on Monday, prompting over 100 drivers to gather in protest the following day with the Auto-Owners Union. The drivers blocked Stanley Road, Kasturiar Road, and other roads near the SLA camp, when soldiers began attacking protestors and damaging their vehicles. In addition, civilians in the surrounding shopping center were also attacked, causing most businesses to close in fear.

The premises of the Tamil daily Namathu Eelanaadu were searched last Thursday, prompting the Free Media Movement to decry it as a violation of the freedom of expression. “Media and journalists in Jaffna face challenging situations now in gathering and disseminating information as war clouds gather by every passing day.”

The Liberation Tigers have been accused of orchestrating the protests and carrying out the attacks, charges which the LTTE denies. But the claims by emergent militant groups in Jaffna are deliberately thinly disguised fronts for the Tigers.

However, the resentment amongst many Tamils unable to return to their homes from which they were displaced by Sri Lankan military offensives in the mid-nineties, is a potent mobilising factor.

Up to a third of the Jaffna peninsula, including hundreds of villages, have been incorporated into the military High Security Zones (HSZs) from which the military, though obligated to do so under the February 2002 truce, is refusing to withdraw.