US slaps terrorist law on Harkat, LTTE

The United States has designated 30 foreign organisations including Pakistan-based Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Ansar and Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as ''terrorist organisations''.

Besides making the oganisations's fund-raising drives illegal, the move denies their members American visas.

Announcing this on Wednesday, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the media that the goal was to ''make the United States a no-support-for-terrorism zone.''

The step has been taken under a 1996 US law which also empowers financial institutions to block such terrorist organisations's funds.

The list included 13 Islamic organisations in the Middle East along with two Israeli groups. Also on it were some Asian and Latin American groups.

Disapproving the HUA and the LTTE's terrorist activities, President Bill Clinton had said, ''Now we will work to uncover those who raise money for (such groups) in America and encourage our friends and allies to do the same within their own borders.''

According to the state department's annual report on global terrorism, the HUA has carried out a number of operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Kashmir. Linked to the Kashmiri militant group Al-Faran that has held four western hostages in Kashmir since July 1995, the HUA is an Islamic militant group that seeks Kashmir's accession to Pakistan, the report said.

The HUA was established in October 1993 with the merger of two Pakistani political activist groups, Harkat ul-Jihad Al-Islami and Harkat ul-Mujahedin.

Quoting the alliance leader Maulana Saadatullah Khan as saying that the group's objective is to continue armed struggle against non-believers and anti-Islamic forces, the report said HUA has several thousand armed members located in ''Azad Kashmir'' (Pakistan occupied Kashmir) and in the southern Kashmir.

According to the state department document, the HUA collects donations from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf and Islamic states. The source and amount of HUA's military funding are unknown but are believed to come from sympathetic Arab countries and wealthy Pakistanis and Kashmiris, it adds.

As for the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government has been urging the US for quite some time to declare the group a terrorist organisation.

Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar recently met Albright and renewed his government's demand for a ban on the LTTE's fund-raising and other activities in the US.

Founded in 1976, the LTTE's terrorist programme targets not only key personnel in the countryside but also senior Sri Lankan political and military leaders.

'Political assassinations included former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lanka's president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993,' it adds.

As per the law, individuals found helping terrorist organisations can be sentenced up to 10 years. As for financial institutions, they face civil penalties and possible criminal prosecution in case they do not conform to the law and regulations. The law was inspired by the April 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma city.

UNI

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