Arrest LTTE Leaders in the United Kingdom

The whole world realized how destructive terrorism
could be after the September 11th attack. The paradise
island of Sri Lanka had been experiencing similar
attacks for the last 18 years resulting untold
hardship to all the ethnic groups, but the world never
paid any attention to the reality for so long enabling
LTTE terrorists to get stronger day by day. Though
late and a major damage is done, the UK government did
identify terrorist organizations which are operating
from the British soil and banned them following the US
footsteps. Obviously notorious LTTE was included in
the list of terrorist groups banned in the UK
completely destroying the claim of LTTE being a group
of freedom fighters and labeling them as terrorists
rightly so, due to the activities they have been
involved in the past. While all the peace loving Sri
Lankans would like to pay gratitude to the UK
government and its officials who took the first step
of fighting against terrorism, there are a lot more
work needs to be done. It is a very well known fact
that the LTTE operates several offices and some of
their key personalities are still based in the UK
providing them a safe heaven to plan, raise funds and
carry out more and more barbaric attacks against
humanity. The only way to stop them from doing so is
by closing all their offices and arresting the LTTE
leaders including their theoretician Dr. Anton
Balasigham and Mrs. Balasingham, who is an Austrian.
It should be noted that Mr. Balasingham holds a
British passport that is being heavily used to gather
international terrorist momentum. In addition to
arresting and charging him on terrorism counts, he
should be charged by immigration authorities for
illegally leaving the UK soil and entering other
countries. The most recent case being his entry into
the war zone in Sri Lanka and returning to the UK via
Thailand by illegal means. All the other LTTE front
organizations and their leaders also should be treated
the same way before it is too late. As shown in the
recent past, community unrest is popping up in the UK
and it will not take a very long time for the LTTE to
start a separatist movement in the UK along with
similar claim in Canada.

Once again, the leader of the LTTE terrorists Mr.
Velupillae Prabakaran is trying to side step and buy
more time until the dust settles of the US attacks by
claiming that he is "willing" to consider a settlement
short of a separate state. Even though the media has
given a vast coverage to that statement we should not
forget the fact that it is a very ambiguous statement
and he has never kept his proclaimed commitments in
the past. To start with, he purposely used the word
"willing" in his statement, which does not have any
binding. At the beginning of the Norwegian peace
efforts he committed to start peace talks without any
pre-conditions but later started putting up one
condition after the other. So the only way forward is
to shrink his international network by closing all the
front organizations and arresting leaders operating
openly. In that sense the UK government is better
equipped than any other EU members to lead from the
front. It should be noted that if Afghanistan is
guilty of harboring Mr. Osama Bin Laden and his Al
Quaida network, the UK government and other
governments in the world who keep a blind eye to the
LTTE activities in their own backyards are also guilty
of the same crime. Of course Sri Lanka is not a super
power but how can anyone justify over 62,000 deaths in
Sri Lanka in addition to infrastructure damages worth
hundreds of billions of dollars?. After all, the core
issue of discrimination is not only confined to the
Tamil community. Each and every citizen of Sri Lanka
except a select few multi millionaires are
discriminated regardless whether he or she is
Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim or Burger. The only way out
is a complete destruction of the LTTE terrorism with
the assistance of the international community and a
free and fair political culture in which every Sri
Lankan can live in dignity.

We urge the UK government to proceed to the next step
of fighting against terrorism by arresting the leaders
and closing terrorist networks particularly the LTTE
which is the largest such group operating on the
British soil.