Don't mess with truce

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insist the government sticks to the terms of the existing 2002 ceasefire, 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 ceasefire 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 ceasefire and monitoring mechanism "to ensure that acts of terrorism would not be permitted in any way".

Forging election pacts with hardline 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.

But while many analysts say Sri Lanka's peace process stands a better chance under Wickremesi-nghe and his United National Party, which brokered the current ceasefire and which has promised to devolve power to the rebels along a federal model, the Tigers trust neither candidate.

"These 3-1/2 years experience (since the truce) clearly shows that we have lost hope with both sides, both the United National Party and (Rajapakse's) Sri Lanka Freedom Party," Puleedevan added.

"Whatever they said in their manifestos is nothing to do with what they will implement," he said. "We have no choice at all with these two candidates (because neither) are going to deliver anything tangible to the Tamil people."

How to take forward the peace process is a main axis of the election campaign, and sealing a permanent end to a conflict that has killed over 64,000 people and ravaged swathes of the rebel-held northeast is the key to luring foreign investment into the $20 billion economy.

But a silent war of attrition continues to rage in the island's east that the military and the rebels each blame on the other. Dozens of police, soldiers and rebel cadres have been killed in a rash of attacks in recent months, which monitors warn is undermining the ceasefire.

"There's less prospect (of progress after the election) frankly speaking, because we can't find any difference between the candidates," Puleedevan said, referring to stalled peace talks.