Sri Lanka called on Western powers last week to be wary of imposing sanctions for its alleged human rights violations, warning that the action could worsen the island's long-running ethnic conflict.
The United States and the European Union have withheld various aid programs and are debating whether to withdraw special trade benefits from Sri Lanka amid concerns the human rights situation has deteriorated since the government pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce with the Tamil Tigers in January.
"It really is necessary to have sympathy for and understanding of the problems of a developing country that is grappling with terrorism," Sri Lanka's minister of international trade G.L. Peiris said in Washington on May 29.
"And to cut off resources, to threaten to withdraw trade benefits, GSP (General System of Preference) and so on -- all of that is unhelpful because that will only mean the dissemination of poverty, deprivation and adversity," he told AFP.
Peiris said under such sanctions and other pressures on "a democratic government pitted against terrorism, you can't possibly prevail."
Peiris was in Washington for talks with US officials and to woo US investors to set up shop in Sri Lanka's eastern province.
Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse vowed this week to press on with a military campaign to crush the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been fighting for a homeland since 1972.
Expressing concern over the rights violations and the raging civil war, the US State Department said Thursday that there was no military solution to the ethnic conflict, and emphasized the need for a political settlement.
"We have said repeatedly that there is no military solution to the conflict in Sri Lanka and there needs to be a political solution," said Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs Evan Feigenbaum.
"So we are encouraging everybody not least the government to pursue a political solution," Feigenbaum said.
Washington considers the LTTE as a terrorist group.
Sri Lanka was thrown out of the UN's Human Rights Council this month, with the watchdog group Human Rights Watch even branding them as one of the world's worst perpetrators of "disappearances" and abductions.
According to the New York-based group, at least 1,500 people "disappeared" between 2006 and 2007 - mostly ethnic Tamils living in the Sinhalese-majority island's restive north and east.
Peiris cited 60 indictments sent out recently by the office of Sri Lanka's attorney general seeking criminal prosecution on suspected rights abusers, as well as Colombo's action to halt the conscription of child soldiers among paramilitary troops.
If the Western powers pulled back GSP preferential duty-free privileges from Sri Lanka, he said, "then hundreds of thousands of poor people are going to be thrown out of employment.
"It is not going to be a measure directed against the government as 65 to 70 percent of garment factories is situated in the rural sector and people working on garment factories are women who have become breadwinners of families," he said.
