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27-05-2006

Norway envoy meets top Sri Lanka rebel after new shelling

COLOMBO (AFP) - A top Sri Lankan rebel leader met with a Norwegian peace envoy in a bid to salvage a collapsing ceasefire after new shelling was reported along the de facto front line in the country's east.

Rebel sources said Jon Hanssen-Bauer, peacebroker Norway's number two peace emissary, held two hours of talks with S.P. Thamilselvan, head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) political wing.

There was no immediate word on the substance of the meeting.

But Norway's top peace envoy to Sri Lanka, Eric Solheim, said in New Delhi that a big crisis was brewing and that the island could be headed back to full-scale ethnic civil war.

"It is very grave. There is a major crisis looming," Solheim told reporters in the Indian capital where he was due to brief government leaders on his latest peace mission to Sri Lanka.

"Sri Lanka is on the brink of very negative developments. There are five or 10 deaths every day," he said. "Sri Lanka is heading for more violence or all-out war."

Solheim's comments came after the LTTE was quoted by a pro-rebel website earlier in the week as saying the island's Tamil minority was "getting ready for the war."

Saturday's talks between Norway's number two peace envoy and Thamilselvan in northern Kilinochchi, "capital" of rebel-controlled territory, capped a week of peace efforts by the Norwegians aimed at salvaging a four-year-old Oslo-brokered ceasefire that is near collapse.

The discussions came ahead of a Tokyo gathering Tuesday of Sri Lanka's foreign donors who are to review the faltering peace process.

Scandinavian truce monitors on the island say about 600 people, more than half of them civilians, have died since December in an upsurge of violence.

The pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website, meanwhile, reported shelling and gunfire lasting over 30 minutes early Saturday along the de facto front line at Kinnaiyadi, northwest of Batticaloa on the east coast. There was no immediate army comment.

Similar engagements have occurred relatively frequently in the country's north and east recently as tensions rise.

In violence Friday, soldiers killed two Tamil Tiger rebels in the northern Jaffna peninsula, an army statement said. Troops opened fire after stopping a suspicious motorcycle and one of the riders pulled a pistol, it said.

"Both Tamil Tigers were killed on the spot," the army said.

The Tigers, fighting for a minority Tamil homeland, had no immediate comment on the deaths but issued a statement saying five Tamil civilians were killed in the previous 24 hours.

Four victims, most of them businessmen, were shot dead in Jaffna, a Tiger statement said. The fifth victim was gunned down in Batticaloa, it said, blaming government forces or "paramilitaries".

The government has condemned the killing of civilians and also denies supporting a breakaway rebel faction which the Tigers label a "paramilitary force".

The latest deaths came after Hanssen-Bauer and Solheim, held "extensive discussions on the current situation" in Colombo with President Mahinda Rajapakse on Friday, the president's office said.

Solheim has been seeking to bring the LTTE back to the negotiating table they left in April 2003. Solheim held talks with Tiger rebels in January and brought both sides together for truce talks in Switzerland on February 22. But a second round has been put off indefinitely.

More than 60,000 people have died in the Tamil separatist conflict since 1972

Source-AFP