Thaindian News

Brussels, March 17 (IANS) The situation in Sri Lanka was “very risky and dangerous”, a senior EU official has said.
“Approximately 170,000 people - it seems civilian people - are trapped in the north part of Sri Lanka and neither the Sri Lanka government nor the LTTE have until now accepted our appeal for an immediate ceasefire or for finding possibilities for bringing food, basic goods, into this last resort where the fighting is going on,” EuAsiaNews reported EU commissioner for external relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner as saying.

“I hope that rather soon a (EU) political troika of maybe the vice-ministers or political directors can go there and we will work in different ways also with other allies in order to find a solution,” she told a press conference Monday evening after a regular meeting of EU foreign ministers.

An estimated 5,000 diaspora Tamils held a demonstration in central Brussels Monday to protest Sri Lanka’s military offensives in territories held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Speaking to journalists earlier Monday on developments in Pakistan, Ferrero-Waldner welcomed the reinstatement of the sacked Pakistani Supreme Court chief justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

“I think it is a good step forward and hopefully now both President Zardari and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and the political opposition can work together to confront the political enemies that are there and also the difficult situation in many parts of Pakistan,” she said.

Ferrero-Waldner said that during a EU Troika meeting with Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi in Prague last Friday the EU told him that “we wanted to see the government come to a compromise with the opposition”.

“We think it is very important that there is political stability in the country because we have an enemy and the enemy is extremism and fundamentalism. This has been our message,” she added.