By Our Defence Correspondent
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has decreed that Muslims are forbidden to enter areas under their control in the Eastern Province, following the riots between Muslims and LTTE cadres two weeks ago, according to sources in the East.

The warning was delivered to mosques around the Batticaloa and Valachchenai areas this week, sources said. There was no indication in the message of what would be the fate of any Muslims who flout the ban.

In retaliation, many Muslim traders are now refusing to do business with Tamil customers, sources said.

It is feared that this ban is the prelude to more systematic attacks by the LTTE on Muslims in the Eastern Province, sources said. Gangs of young Muslim men have begun arming themselves with weapons including handguns, grenades and petrol bombs, to fight back. However, they would be no match for the might of the ruthless Tigers, whose weapons are far superior.

Meanwhile, the peace talks between the LTTE and the government, which were scheduled to have begun in the Thai resort town of Phuket as far back as May of this year, has now been indefinitely postponed, as the tensions over the fate of the Muslims have become the focal point of all discussions. The government and the LTTE had hoped to start talks regarding the Tamil problem in the country, but the Tigers’ persecution of Muslims has led to the Muslim issue taking centrestage.

The LTTE order has officially brought to an end the four-month-old suspension of hostilities between the LTTE and the Muslim community, which has long been persecuted by the Tigers all over both the East and the North.

It also shows up the barefaced lies that LTTE Leader Velupillai Prabhakaran told at his famous April press conference in Kilinochchi in front of more than 200 journalists from several countries. Prabhakaran said that the Tigers had changed their policies and wanted Muslims to return to their homes in the Northeast, promising to treat them as equal citizens and vouched for the fact that they would come to no harm.

In response to that promise, senior leaders of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, including Cabinet Minister and SLMC leader Rauf Hakeem, made special journeys to the Wanni and held discussions with the LTTE leader regarding the rights of Muslims in the Eastern Province. Even at that time, barely a month and a half into the ceasefire, Muslims were complaining of threats and extortion from LTTE cadres who now had free run of government-controlled areas, and were bullying the Muslims into paying thousands of rupees in "taxes" to the LTTE.

Long before the term "ethnic cleansing" was coined by western journalists who were covering the Bosnian war and needed a name for the systematic driving away of the Bosnian Muslim community by the Serbs, the LTTE had carried out its own ethnic cleansing in the North and East, driving hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Mannar, Mullaitivu, Jaffna, Vavuniya, Kilinochchi, Trincomalee, Batticaloa and Ampara districts.

As the Serbs were to do a few years later, the LTTE in the late eighties and early nineties launched carefully planned and systematic attacks on Muslim villages, shooting and hacking to death men, women and children. Hundreds were killed and to this day hundreds of thousands continue to live as refugees, having been unable to go back to their homes.

At the same time, Sinhala villages were also attacked in border areas throughout the northeast, and the Tigers chased out the sizeable Sinhala community in the Jaffna district.

Since then, Muslims in the Northeast have been living only in government-held areas.

But the ceasefire agreement between the government and the LTTE allowed Tiger cadres to enter and remain in government-held areas. The LTTE has now opened "political offices" in almost every town in the Batticaloa district, which openly direct the extortion programmes in each town. Each large-sized shop is forced to pay Rs. 2,500 per month; each small sized shop or "kade" must pay Rs. 500; government servants must pay eight percent of their salaries; Rs. 300 is charged from each three-wheeler driver.

At the same time, the government instructed all police and army units in the Eastern Province not to entertain any complaints regarding crimes by Tiger cadres. Police stations have not even written down complaints from Muslims, let alone act on them. This anxiety of the government to bend over backwards to the criminal demands of the LTTE led directly to the betrayal of the Muslim community, who are after all citizens of this country.

Contrary to false reports regarding the violence that erupted all over the East two weeks ago, where LTTE and government propaganda purported to show that the cause was the assault on two LTTE cadres by unknown persons on Kayts island off the Jaffna Peninsula, the fighting began when Muslim traders in Valachchenai decided to close their shops in a peaceful hartal, to protest against the "taxes."

LTTE cadres in the area tried to bully them Muslims into re-opening the shops, but the shopkeepers stood firm. Meanwhile, Tamil skopkeepers, sensing trouble, closed their own shops in the town. Gangs of Muslims began gathering behind the line of Muslim shops.

As the army and police watched, LTTE cadres lobbed grenades from behind the Tamil shops at the Muslim youth, killing and wounding several. The Tigers then burned lines of Muslim shops to the ground. The Muslims retaliated with petrol bombs being flung at the Tamil shops which were also burned down.

By the time the violence ended several days later, Valachchenai was virtually destroyed. Contrary to propaganda reports, the violence was not between Tamils and Muslims, but LTTE cadres and Muslims.

One fact which was reported in the Island, but carefully concealed in most other newspapers, was that mortar shells were fired during the clashes. This clearly shows that the LTTE was involved, since ordinary Tamils and Muslims do not have such weapons. Only the army, police and LTTE had mortars in the area.

The Eastern situation has shown that the LTTE is nothing better than the Mafia gangs all over the world which extort money from ordinary people under the threat of harming their lives if they don’t. Far from being the "freedom fighters" that Prabhakaran claimed during his press conference, they are nothing more than an organized and sophisticated gang of thieves who rob ordinary people and carry off children to use in 21st century slavery to fight and die for them.