COLOMBO-SRI LANKA — a moving train was reputedly blown up by Tamil insurgents. Unofficial sources place the causalities at 80-50 army personnel and 30 civilians’ dead and scores injured. The insurgents had littered the track with mines. This was the worst attack by the insurgents in which three bogeys were destroyed.
If the country’s overall ratio of Sinhalese to Tamil is recreated in the north, Sinhalese could outnumber Tamils there eventually, Athulathmudali said at a news conference at army headquarters in the capital city of Colombo.
The new proposal came just weeks after President Junius Jayewardene’s plan to grant Tamils in the north more political autonomy was rejected at an all-party conference.
The Tamil United Liberation Front, a moderate Tamil party banned from parliament, rejected Jayewardene’s plan as inadequate.
Party leaders left Sri Lanka for their ancestral home in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where they have been staying since an outbreak of ethnic violence in Sri Lanka in July, 1983.
The late Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had urged them to participate in the conference to resolve the Tamil crisis.
The Sri Lankan government has said it will hold no more talks with the party until it renounces its aim to set up a separate state in the north.
It also said it would hold no talks with India on the Tamil issue except dealing with charges that India is harboring and training Tamil militants in Tamil Nadu. India has denied this charge.
Article extracted from this publication >> January 25, 1985
