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| Sunday, 29 May 2005 |
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Clinton to visit LTTE areas next time KALMUNAI, Sri Lanka, Saturday (Reuters) Former U.S. president Bill Clinton visited a corner of Sri Lanka on Saturday that was one of the hardest hit in the Dec. 26 tsunami and said he intended to tour Tamil rebel-held areas on a future trip. Clinton, the U.N. envoy for tsunami relief, talked to community leaders from different ethnic groups in Kalmunai, a fishing town on the east coast, where the tsunami killed more than 2,500 people. He said he wanted to show local leaders his support for a proposed "joint mechanism", in which the government and Tamil Tiger rebels would work together in allocating nearly $3 billion in tsunami aid that international donors have pledged. Asked why he did not visit areas held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to show that support, he said: "Keep in mind I'll be back a lot and I expect to go there and I expect to look at every place in the country." Clinton said he only had time on this trip for one meeting and wanted to meet Tamils, Muslims and Buddhists "at a neutral ground, where all the parties could come". "And I think we achieved that. We had representatives from all the communities there." The LTTE's bloody two-decade war for autonomy killed more than 64,000 people until a ceasefire with the government three years ago. The island republic is dominated by the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese, but Tamils form a significant minority. President Chandrika Kumaratunga said last week that signing an aid sharing deal with the rebels could pave the way to a peaceful solution to a conflict that has undermined the country's development. The tsunmai, which devasted much of the island's coastline, killed nearly 40,000 people in Sri Lanka. Clinton said the "joint mechanism" was key to getting the slow rebuilding process going. He expressed concern at the meeting with community leaders about the government's plan to relocate people who before the tsunami lived within 100-200 metres of the coast, saying it was not always practical to do that. The solution he said was "to build stronger houses" in that area. Clinton arrived in Sri Lanka from India, where he visited the badly hit fishing town of Nagapattinam in the southern state of Tamil Nadu where about 8,000 people died when the killer waves slammed into its crowded coast. He will tour tsunami hit areas of the Maldives on Sunday, before flying to Indonesia's Aceh province, which accounts for most of the 228,000 people feared killed in the unprecedented tsunmai spawned by one of the strongest earthquakes in history. |
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