COLOMBO, Jan. 24 (Xinhuanet) -- Sri Lanka's Tamil rebels have expressed their willingness to join a common program with the government for providing relief to the stricken victims of the tsunami disaster in the North-East, the official Daily News reported Monday.

    According to the newspaper, the leadership of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said they are willing to participate in the program before any recommencement of peace talks with the government.

    "The government and the LTTE are engaged in preliminary discussions to formulate a mechanism to co-operate in relief work in the North-East. The discussions will be confined to humanitarian work and no political issues will be taken up," LTTE chief negotiator Anton Balasingham said.

    At a recent meeting with the visiting Norwegian peace facilitators, the LTTE supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran expressed his willingness to co-operate with the government to work out a mechanism to coordinate post tsunami relief assistance in the North-East.

    Prabhakaran pointed out that it was not the time to talk about "peace talks" and the LTTE alone was unable to carry out development work in the North-East, although his organization had taken the initiative to provide relief to the people in the region,at the initial stages immediately after the tsunami disaster.

    The LTTE leader further said that he would like to see a memberfrom the LTTE is included in the specially formed International Trust Fund initiated by the World Bank to provide relief to the people hit by the disaster, working in collaboration with the government.

    Prabhakaran said that what the government should do at present was to act in such a way to win the confidence of the LTTE and theTamil people.

    If the government could do that and once the development work of the area destroyed by tsunami is completed, the peace process would also be a success, said Prabhakaran.

    While praising the government for carrying out projects to provide relief to people without political considerations, Prabhakaran said that he trusted the same policy would be applied in providing relief to all without ethnicity considerations.

    Norway brokered a 2002 cease-fire in Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war.

    The peace process came to be stalled in April 2003 when the LTTE announced a temporary pull out blaming the then Sri Lankan government of doing little to implement decisions taken at six rounds of talks. Enditem