Group Challenges Ban on Aid

Re “Suit Challenges Ban on Aid to Terrorists,” March 20:

It is the worst form of demagogy that the Los Angeles-based Humanitarian Law Project allows itself to join hands with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group notorious for violence and grave abuses of human rights. The solidarity offered to the Tamil gang, damned for its gross violations by almost all human rights organizations including Amnesty International, is uncalled-for. The so-called militants of the LTTE have been engaged in slaughtering unarmed civilians in the eastern and northern provinces of Sri Lanka for the contemptible purpose of ethnic cleansing.

As true fascists do, they killed the country’s alternative Tamil leadership, making the Sri Lankan conflict the most horrible and prolonged fratricidal war in the world. The bombings by the group at a busy intersection in the city of Colombo (March 6) or at the holiest Buddhist shrine in the island republic, in January, point to the wisdom of the State Department in designating them as terrorists.

The brave step of the U.S. in proscribing the group is preventing them from establishing a fountainhead of funds by appeal or by extortion among expatriate groups in this country. Any group fighting for the LTTE’s right to collect funds should think twice before they call themselves human rights activists.

WALTER JAYAWARDHANA

President, Sinhala Defense League

Los Angeles