Sri Lanka's Tamil minority politicians have accused presidential candidates of the country's major Sinhalese political parties of using the country's long drawn out ethnic conflict to further their own political goals.

Addressing a ceremony in the eastern port town of Trincomalee late Saturday, the politicians from the Tamil National Alliance ( TNA) blamed the majority Sinhalese political party candidates of trying to garner the Tamil votes without any sincere motive to solve the ethnic conflict.

TNA legislator Nadaraja Raviraj said that both the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the United National Party (UNP) had used the Tamil question to their advantage while offering nothing to the Tamil minority in return.

The TNA polled over 600,000 votes from the war torn north and east regions in the last parliamentary election held in April 2004.

The Tamil votes in the north and east in the island would be crucial for both the ruling party candidate Mahinda Rajapakse and the main opposition candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe, the front runners in the country's Nov. 17 presidential poll.

In order to cross the 50 percent plus one vote needed for victory the votes from the minority communities Tamil and Muslim are of paramount importance to both candidates, analysts say.

Source: Xinhua