The court decision to de-merge North East, is another blow to LTTE, camealong with severe military defeat they are facing today. It is a bigpolitical defeat for them and the behaviour of TNA MPs in the parliamentindicates it clearly.

In the first place, the amalgamation of North and East provinces is illegal.According to the constitution a merger or a geographical division could bedone only after a referendum. This is the legal implication of thisamalgamation, which justifies the court decision given in favour of thede-merger.

The political implications are more significant here as the interestedparties (specially LTTE) have already misappropriated this mistake done bythe government in 1987 under the influence of late Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi,who openly supported LTTE during the period.

Before this illegal merger Sri Lanka had been divided in to 9 provinces forthe convenience of governance. These were just geographical provinces butneither political divisions nor ethnic based divisions. Central, Western,Southern, Uva, North Central, North Western, Sabaragamuwa, North & East werethe 9 provinces. When the respective areas covered by each province and thepopulation density were concerned these divisions seemed to be reasonableand had given convenience for ruling. Merging North and East provincesreduced the number of provinces to 8 by establishing a huge single provincecalled North East which nearly covered 30\% of the whole country making theprovincial structure unbalanced.

When the sovereignty of the country is concerned, the most serious andnegative aspect of the merger is that the new North East provinceindirectly demarked the rough geographical area LTTE is considering as theirso called Ealam. Therefore the merger of the two provinces made it easierfor the LTTE to establish their political propaganda based on this singleprovince. The claim for ealam boiled down to acquiring a single province,which was ready-made for them.

With the current situation LTTE is losing control in the Eastern province.Ifby any chance government comes into a political settlement with the LTTEbased on some sort of power devolution, the vote base and the politicalpower they have in the North will give them the Eastern province also as abonus, if North and East remained to be merged. When these two are separatedthey have to compete for two different provinces from which, the East isvery unlikely for them to gain any reasonable power in. (Eastern ethnic based population : Sinhala 26\%, Muslim 32\% and Tamil 40\%; After merger North-East ethnic based population : Sinhala 13\%, Muslim 18\% and Tamil 65\%).

Considering all above, the court decision to de-merge North East can beconsidered as a victory of all peace loving and anti-terrorist people of thecountry. It is our duty to defeat any external or internal forces that mayarise against the court decision.

We the undersigned, earnestly request the Sri Lankan government to respectand take the full benefit of the above Supreme Court order to defeat LTTEseparatism. Under no circumstance this Court order should be challenged anymanner at this crucial juncture or in future.