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[October 7, 2004 - 9.00 GMT] (AFP) COLOMBO - Three international human rights organisations on Thursday stepped up pressure on Sri Lanka’s Tiger rebels to halt political killings and resume peace talks. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) said they had asked a Tamil Tiger delegation in Geneva earlier this week to end the murders and the recruitment of child soldiers. A strongly-worded joint statement by the three organisations came as Sri Lanka’s peace broker Norway called on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to stop the killings and warned that they undermined a fragile truce. Norway’s deputy foreign minister Vidar Helgesen has expressed Oslo’s “growing concern” over political assassinations blamed on the Tiger rebels. The Tigers have denied involvement in the assassinations. The three rights groups said they told the Tiger’s political wing leader S. P. Thamilselvan that the rebel group must demonstrate how they will respect international human rights laws in Sri Lanka. “We appealed to the senior LTTE leaders to show the world that they are both willing and capable of respecting the lives and rights of all Sri Lankans,” International Commission of Jurists secretary-general Nicholas Howen said in a statement. “We look to them to make a clear public commitment to international humanitarian and human rights standards and practical ways of putting them into effect,” he added. There was no immediate reaction from the Tigers, but the joint statement quoted Thamilselvan as saying that the rebels denied responsibility, but would consider the “development of confidence building measures to end killings that are threatening the peace process.” “At a time when we should be moving back to peace talks the LTTE seems to have dramatically escalated the killing of perceived Tamil opponents and is still recruiting child soldiers,” said Loubna Freih, the Geneva Director for Human Rights Watch. The New York-based group noted that victims of killings included activists from Tamil political parties not aligned with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, members of a rival faction in the east, and alleged Sri Lankan military informants. The Sri Lankan government has accused Tiger fighters of killing more than 250 rivals during the ceasefire that was put in place by Norway in February 2002. The Tigers suspended their participation in Oslo-brokered peace talks in April last year after accusing Colombo of trying to sideline them in attracting foreign aid to rebuild war-ravaged regions. Diplomatic efforts since have failed to get the two parties back to the negotiating table to resolve a conflict that has claimed more than 60,000 lives since 1972. “This climate of fear, especially in the east, will make it even more difficult to find a lasting peace in the country,” said Geneva Representative for Amnesty International, Peter Splinter. The joint statement also drew attention to the issue of child soldiers within the ranks of the Tamil Tigers. Since last year the Tigers have been freeing small batches of child soldiers to UNICEF-run centres that help the former combatants return to school, but UNICEF has said that rebels had recruited more than they freed in recent times. The rebels deny willingly enlisting children and say poverty has driven some children to falsify their age and join up because they had no other way to feed themselves.
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