Sri Lankan Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse's pledge to amend the terms of a truce with the Tamil Tigers if elected president next month could cause the agreement to collapse, the rebels warned on Monday.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insist the government sticks to the terms of the existing 2002 cease-fire, but have vowed not to restart their two-decade war for self-rule and observers expect the truce to hold.
Stung by European Union sanctions after the August assassination of the island's foreign minister by suspected rebel snipers, the Tigers want the international community to put pressure on the government to share $3 billion in tsunami aid before the stalled peace process can progress.
"According to the ceasefire agreement and the peace process, the government of Sri Lanka and LTTE are the only equal partners ... So nobody can change it. Nobody can touch it," S. Puleedevan, head of the rebels' Peace Secretariat, told Reuters by telephone from the Tigers' northern stronghold of Kilinochchi.
"Nobody can take unilateral decisions that means that that's the end of the cease-fire agreement," he added.
Rajapakse, who is set to battle main opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, a former prime minister, for the presidency in a vote seen too close to call, vowed in his manifesto to amend the cease-fire and monitoring mechanism "to ensure that acts of terrorism would not be permitted in any way".
Forging election pacts with hard-line Marxists and Buddhist monks who hate the Tigers, he has also ruled out wide devolution, rejects outright the rebels' central demand for a Tamil homeland and has promised to ditch a tsunami aid-sharing plan that has run aground in the courts.
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