by Amal Jayasinghe
COLOMBO, Nov. 23 [AFP] - Britain Thursday pushed Sri Lanka’s warning partners to start Norwegian-backed peace talks and said London was considering a Colombo government request to outlaw Tamil Tiger rebels.

Britain’s junior foreign minister Peter Hain who held talks with Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake and other leaders said that Colombo had asked London to ban the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [LTTE].

"We are considering it very seriously," Hain said, cautioning that the outcome will depend on interpretation of new anti-terrorism laws that will go into effect in Britain next year and a decision by the UK’s Home Secretary Jack Straw.

The Tigers maintain their international secretariat in London.

The LTTE’s London-based leader, Anton Balasingham has held talks with Norwegian peace envoy to Sri Lanka, Erik Solheim, who is also in close contact with Britain, this island’s former colonial ruler.

Hain’s concern for the safety of civilians was heightened with a rebel attack that killed two villagers in the North of the island Thursday and a navy attack the previous day that killed four fishermen, officials said.

Hain said he was asking both the Tamil Tigers and the Colombo government to begin a dialogue in line with an initiative by Oslo and was optimistic of early talks.

"It is in everybody’s interest to end the military conflict," Hain said. "We have given a strong message to the LTTE that there is no alternative to peace talks. And that has been my advise to the government."

He said he believed Sri Lankan leaders were awaiting signals from LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Prabhakaran, who met with Norway’s Solheim on November 1, is expected to make a policy statement on Monday at the end of a week-long commemoration of the rebels’ war-dead.

Hain said it was not realistic to expect the LTTE to abandon their main objective of a separate state called Eelam, but the guerrillas had to accept that there was no international support for such a move.

Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils would be better off with greater autonomy and the right to self-determination in their every-day lives, he said.

"Tamil people don’t want a fancy constitutional architecture," Hain said. "They want jobs...to go about their business. The interests of all parties can be reconciled if the parties are willing to sit down and talk."

He said he was not keen to look back at previous failed peace bids. "I don’t want to anticipate another failure, but look to success," he said.

There was a sense of war weariness among the majority Sinhalese community as well as among Tamils, he said, adding that both the government and the LTTE too were tired of war.

He said LTTE leaders should also take advantage of the latest peace bid as the setting up of a international court under the United Nations could leave rebel leaders open to prosecution.

The LTTE he said had committed "brutal acts of war."

"If the LTTE turns its back on brutal acts of war and come to the negotiating table, they will be spared being brought to the international court..." he said.

Britain, which was Sri Lanka’s former colonial ruler until 1948, was in a position to help the island’s peace process, Hain said, adding that they were in consultation with the US and neighbouring India over the developments here.

The US banned the LTTE as a "foreign terrorist organisation" in October 1997 while India banned the LTTE after the group was implicated in the May 1991 assassination of former Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi.