Rajapaksa: I’ll sell it to the South after clearing LTTE-held territory

Chennai: “I am firmly committed to a just and enduring political solution” to the Tamil question in Sri Lanka and “am clear that there are no military solutions to political questions,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa told me in a telephonic conversation from Colombo on Thursday morning.

While the Sri Lankan forces are closing on the LTTE chief in Vanni, the saviours and financiers of the LTTE in Australia exhorted the followers through their websites in Brisbane and Sydney to join in their demonstrations in Canberra.

"While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him" -- Mikhailovich Dostovsky

The tiny island nation of Sri Lanka has been plagued by terrorism for the past 25 years. Citing irreparable differences with the majority ethnic group, the armed militant group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelaam (LTTE) is demanding 35 percent of the country's landmass and over 75 percent of its surrounding sea for a separate Tamil state. Constituting only 6.5 percent of the country's population, over half of the country's Tamils currently live amongst th majority Sinhalese.