U.S. to declare Tigers terrorists: Minister

U.S. to declare Tigers terrorists: Minister

COLOMBO (Agencies): The United States plans to declare Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger guerrillas as terrorists, a move that will lead to freezing the rebels' foreign assets, a senior minister said here yesterday.

Justice Minister G. L. Peiris said the U.S. authorities had told him, during his recent visit to Washington, that the Clinton administration was preparing a list of terrorist organizations worldwide.

"I have been told that the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) will no doubt be included," Peiris said, adding that Canada and Germany were contemplating similar action to block foreign funding for the Tigers.

U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said recently that the Clinton administration considered the LTTE to be "ruthless and vicious terrorists."

"As a general rule, the United States itself certainly will not have productive relations with any terrorist group," Burns said.

The LTTE has already warned that Washington's diplomatic and military support of Colombo would "expand" the civil war, which has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past 23 years.

"American arms are being sold to the Sri Lankan government since it withdrew its earlier stand of not selling lethal weapons to Sri Lanka," an LTTE publication said.

The LTTE is leading a violent guerrilla campaign for independence in the island's northern and eastern regions and have been accused of devastating attacks against civilian, as well as military, targets.

In August, the U.S. sent a high-level team here to discuss counter-terrorism after describing the LTTE as a terrorist organization. However, the Tigers are yet to be formally declared terrorists.

The U.S. team led by ambassador Philip Wilcox, co-ordinator for counter-terrorism in the state department, said terrorism could not be excused for political reasons and must be treated as an unmitigated crime.

Sri Lanka maintains that the LTTE funds its military activities through extortion in western nations where there is a considerable expatriate Tamil community.

Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government yesterday removed censorship of news on the country's ethnic war, imposed on the domestic media earlier this year.

"The censorship is lifted with immediate effect," Media Minister Dharmasiri Senanayake told a news conference.

The censorship was imposed just before government forces launched the final phase of their offensive to oust Tamil Tiger rebels from their northern Jaffna peninsula stronghold.

The army completed the takeover of the peninsula, 400 kilometers north of Colombo, in April but the censorship continued despite repeated protests by the media.

The end of censorship follows the capture late last month of Kilinochchi, the last major town controlled by the LTTE, which is fighting for an independent homeland for minority Tamils in Sri Lanka.