Tigers travel to Europe amid fears for truce

A four-member delegation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will hold talks with officials in Oslo on Sri Lanka's political power struggle here that has undermined peace efforts, the rebels said.

The Tiger team, led by the group's political wing leader S. P. Thamilselvan, will visit Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands after their talks in Oslo, the rebels said.

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The visit is the first for the LTTE after President Chandrika Kumaratunga took over the control of troops and the police from her arch rival Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been leading the peace bid with Tigers.

The president and the premier are at loggerheads over how to deal with the Tamil Tigers. Their stand-off came to a head when Kumaratunga sacked three ministers in Wickremesinghe's government on November 4.

The Tigers said they will explain to European nations how their peace initiative had been affected by the political wrangling in the Sri Lankan government since then.

The crisis erupted four days after the Tigers unveiled their first ever blueprint for a political settlement to end three decades of ethnic bloodshed that had claimed over 60,000 lives.

"They (the Tiger delegation) will hold many high level discussions there (in Europe) to explain how the political crisis in the south (of Sri Lanka) has affected the peace efforts and also about the hardships the Tamil people are facing in their day-to-day life," the LTTE's peace secretariat said.

"They will announce the present stand of the LTTE on the recent power struggle in the south."

Last week, the LTTE warned that Sri Lanka could return to war following Kumaratunga's latest political pact with a leftist party which is opposed to granting autonomy to minority Tamils.

The rebels expressed fear that Kumaratunga's tie-up last week with the radical leftist JVP, or People's Liberation Front, could lead to a collapse of a Norwegian-brokered truce in place since February 2002.

Both the president and the JVP have been highly critical of Norway with the leftists insisting that the peace broker should be kicked out by Kumaratunga, a demand she has so far resisted.

Kumaratunga, whose party is in the opposition in parliament, is widely expected to call snap elections giving her new alliance a chance of toppling Wickre-mesinghe.