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.