orway nor regional power India offered any support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who appealed for international recognition for a renewed separatist struggle.LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, accusing Sri Lanka of waging war under cover of peace talks, said Monday the 2.5-million Tamil minority were left “with no other option but an independent state”. He went back on a 2002 pledge to accept a federal solution to the ethnic conflict which led to a ceasefire and years of Norwegian-sponsored peace talks.
The US, which outlawed the rebels as terrorists in 1997, took a hard line against Prabhakaran’s vow to build Tamils their own state in the north and east of the island. US ambassador Robert Blake said Washington “strongly disagrees” with the rebels, and ruled out a military solution. “There is a very clear alternative, which is for the LTTE to renounce terrorism, to give up violence and to join in negotiating a peaceful solution to Sri Lanka’s conflict that will satisfy the aspirations of all of the country’s people,” Blake said Tuesday night.