Posters in Colombo denounce 'Norway-Ranil plot'

[TamilNet, Sunday, 19 May 2002, 22:21 GMT]
Sinhala nationalist groups in Sri Lanka this week stepped up their campaign against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's attempt to strike a peace deal with the Liberation Tigers. Thousands of posters put up all over the city by one group say, "Let's defeat the Norway-Ranil plan to hand over the country to the Tigers".

Sri Lanka's main opposition parties, the People's Alliance and the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna, have been exhorting the Sinhalese openly and subtly that the United National Front government is plotting with Norway to hand over the island's northeastern province to the Liberation Tigers to pave the way for a separate Tamil state.

Thousands of posters denouncing "Norway-Ranil plot" were put up in Colombo and provincial towns this week. Photo:TamilNet

The meeting was called at the 23-3 Brigade Headquarters in Batticaloa town to discuss the status of public and private building occupied by the military in the district, army sources said.The posters call on the Sinhala people to unite against the Tamil threat.

"The group that put up these posters styles itself as the National Movement Against Terrorism. It is a well known arm of a Sinhala nationalist party. The posters are damaging in that they give the impression that Sinhala opposition to the peace process is on the rise. This might scare away Sinhala people who have come forward to support the peace process", said a senior political columnist with a popular Sinhala weekly published in Colombo when asked to comment on the poster's political background.