From MIZZIMA News Group (r)

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Myanmar promises Lanka it won't support LTTE

P.K. Balachanddran
Colombo, July 17
>From the Hindustan Times

>From MIZZIMA New Group
18th July 1999

MYANMAR'S FOREIGN Minister, U Win Aung, has "promised" that his country
will not support the LTTE, and if Sri Lanka conveys any information of
LTTE activity like arms smuggling from Myanmarese soil, his government
will take prompt action.

But for Sri Lanka the proof of the pudding would be in the eating. The
Myanmarese Minister, currently on a visit here, has been quoted in the
State owned 'Daily News' today as saying that he had also agreed to a
Sri Lankan Government suggestion that the two countries share
information on cross-border terrorism. It is well known that Myanmar has
been a major base for the LTTE since the Eighties. According to the Sri
Lankan strategic analyst, Mr Rohan Gunaratna, Myanmar remains an
important Naval base of the LTTE. Although the LTTE has vacated the
island of Twante (off the Myanmarese Coast), Myanmar remains a very
important centre of LTTE activity and a difficult centre to monitor, he
says in his book, Sri Lanka's Ethnic Crisis and National Security. The
LTTE has not only procured substantial quantities of weapons from
sections of the military junta in Myanmar, but also facilitated
narcotics found in the US  is of Myanmarese origin, said Mr Gunaratna.

'Illyana', an LTTE ship carrying weapons from Singapore, unloaded the
weapons off Mullaitivu in mid-Sept, 1987 he says, quoting Lt Gen
Dipender Singh, the first overall commander of the IPKF.

In his book, IPKF in Sri Lanka, Gen Dipender Singh had said that the
Indian Navy had located Illyana in the Rangoon harbour, but it could not
apprehend the gun-runner because the Navy had no permit to enter the
Rangoon harbour. According to Mr Gunaratna, the LTTE had trained over
1,000 cadres of the Tamil Nadu Retrieval Force, a Tamil Nadu separatist
group, at Twante, when this island was in its hands.