Moslems may leave Puttalam

Moslems may leave Puttalam

COLOMBO (AFP): An ultimatum purporting to come from Tamil rebels has warned Moslems to vacate a northwestern region by Aug. 1 or be forcibly evicted, legislators said yesterday.

Moslem leaders in the northwestern district of Puttalam received the ultimatum, which bore the letterhead of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), according to Mohamed Hisbullah, a member of parliament from the Sri Lanka Moslem Congress party.

"The letters warned Moslems in Puttalam to leave by Aug. 1 or they will be forced to go. We will be meeting President (Chandrika) Kumaratunga next week to brief her on this development," Hisbullah said.

He said he could not confirm whether the letters, received earlier this week, actually came from the LTTE, but noted they were typed and written in fluent Tamil, unlike a similar ultimatum that urged Moslems to vacate the eastern town of Kathankudy by July 1.

The LTTE denied sending that ultimatum and accused the government of trying to drive a wedge between Moslems and Tamils, both minority ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. Large numbers of Moslems, mostly traders, live in Puttalam.

The earlier ultimatum, also purporting to come from the LTTE, was "handwritten and had a lot of grammatical errors," Hisbullah said.

Following an ultimatum in 1990, some 80,000 Moslems fled northern Jaffna and some 200 Moslem worshippers were massacred at mosques in Kathankudy and neighboring Eravur.

The massacre was blamed on the LTTE, which, however, denied being involved.

Some 70 percent of Sri Lanka's 17 million people are ethnically Sinhalese. The island also has about 1.5 million Moslems and some 2.5 million Tamils. The LTTE is fighting for a separate state in the northeast for the Tamils.