TNA agrees to renounce support to separation of Sri Lanka

Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the main Tamil political party, has agreed to renounce its support to separation of Sri Lanka and accept an undivided country.
The TNA yesterday agreed to submit an affidavit in the Supreme Court that Sri Lanka is a unitary state during a hearing on six petitions filed by Sinhala majority nationalist organisations, media reports said here today.
The Sinhala groups claimed that the TNA's political objective was to divide Sri Lanka and create a separate Tamil state in the north and eastern provinces.
The petitions said that during the last year's northern provincial council election, the TNA's election manifesto contained references to a separate state.

The Tamil counsels for the TNA respondents submitted to the court that they accept that Sri Lanka is a unitary state and that there was no intent to form a separate state.
The case will be heard again in mid September.

The TNA was formed in early 2004 as a loose coalition of moderate Tamil parties but was largely seen as a strategic move by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The Lankan army crushed the LTTE in 2009, ending the militant group's three-decade-old fight to create a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern provinces.
The TNA has been since known as a proxy of the Tamil Tigers although it did not publicly support the idea of a separate Tamil homeland.

The party's public pronouncement has been for a model which permitted maximum devolution to the Tamil regions within a united Sri Lanka.
The Sinhala majority organisations continue to accuse the main Tamil party of opposing the unitary character of the island.