Sri Lanka - For Those Who May Be Interested

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Permalink Reply by ozzieowl on May 18, 2009 at 4:03am

Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers concede defeat
May 18, 2009, 6:33 am
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Sri Lanka's long war reaches climax as Tigers concede
May 18, 2009, 6:28 am


Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have admitted defeat in their decades-old battle for an independent ethnic homeland, with the remnants of their rebel army encircled by advancing government forces.

In what could mark the end of Asia's longest-running civil war - one that left more than 70,000 dead in pitched battles, suicide attacks, bomb strikes and assassinations - the rebels say they are laying down their weapons.

Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers' chief of international relations, said on Sunday in a statement on the pro-rebel Tamilnet website that the war was at "its bitter end".

"We remain with one last choice - to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people," he said, as the rebels claimed 25,000 dead or injured civilians were scattered across the war zone.

"We have decided to silence our guns. Our only regrets are for the lives lost and that we could not hold out for longer," he added, calling for peace negotiations.

But the military refused to let up in their offensive, saying troops were pushing on to recapture "every inch of land" held by the remnants of the Tamil Tiger army - estimated at less than a square kilometre of jungle.

Defence officials said they had recovered the corpses of two rebel commanders - but that there was no sign of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers' founder and leader, amid widespread speculation he may have committed suicide or fled.

Pathmanathan told Britain's Channel 4 news Prabhakaran, who has been living underground since 1972, was still in the war zone along with 2,000 of his fighters - and ready to talk peace but not surrender.

Only two years ago, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) controlled nearly a third of the island nation and operated an effectively autonomous Tamil state with courts, schools and a civil service.

But the government of President Mahinda Rajapakse launched a military assault which drove the Tigers out of the east and then the north, before trapping the remaining guerrillas on a northeast coastal lagoon peninsula.

"They were actually defeated some time ago, but they have formally accepted defeat only now," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara told AFP.

"They fought for an Eelam (separate state) that they could never win. It was only a waste of lives. They have caused massive death and destruction over the years. Finally they themselves have realised that it is all over."

President Mahinda Rajapakse, who announced in Jordan on Saturday that his forces had defeated the rebels, was greeted by supporters waving flags and setting off firecrackers as he returned home earlier on Sunday.

He is expected to announce in a special parliament session on Tuesday that the war is over, officials said, although street celebrations have already erupted across the country with residents hugging troops on the streets and offering sweets and milk rice to each other.

But the military's push has come at the cost of thousands of innocent lives, according to the United Nations , and the government has faced international condemnation for its conduct of the war in recent months.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral organisation working in the war zone, described the situation as "an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe". The UN has called for a war crimes probe.

But Sri Lanka's officials said the army had managed to rescue all civilians held hostage by the Tigers.

"There was no bloodbath as some people feared," human rights minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told reporters. "Everybody has come out safely and they are being looked after by the government."

He said more than 63,000 people had crossed over into government territory in the past three days, raising the number of civilians who fled the war zone since January to nearly 250,000.

But the displaced are being moved in to state-run "welfare villages" - camps ringed by barbed wire that are also a source of international alarm. Rights workers, aid groups and journalists are also being denied free access to the north.

Former colonial power Britain said Rajapakse also needed to address the root causes of the war.

"The fundamental responsibility is to build a political system in Sri Lanka in which all the communities, including the Tamils, have their rights fully respected," British foreign secretary David Miliband told the BBC.

"That hasn't been the case, it needs to be the case."

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Permalink Reply by ozzieowl on May 18, 2009 at 4:07am

Sri Lanka's long war reaches climax as Tigers concede
May 18, 2009, 6:28 am
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Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers concede defeat
May 18, 2009, 6:33 am

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's relentless military offensive drove the Tamil Tiger separatists on Sunday to admit defeat in a quarter-century conflict seen as one of the world's most intractable wars.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) conceded the war hours after they sent out suicide attackers as part of a last-ditch fight to fend off the military's final assault on the sole square kilometre (0.5 sq mile) they controlled.

"This battle has reached its bitter end," the LTTE's diplomatic chief, Selvarajah Pathmanathan, said in a statement posted on the pro-rebel web site www.TamilNet.com. "We have decided to silence our guns."

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had declared victory on Saturday after troops seized the entire coast for the first time since the war erupted in 1983, even as the climactic battle raged in the sandy patch where the LTTE was dug in for a last stand.

Rajapaksa was due to make a formal victory announcement in parliament on Tuesday morning, but already flags were flying, and people danced and lit fireworks in celebration.

Even though there has been little doubt for months about who would win Asia's longest modern war, sporadic battles were still being fought late on Sunday and no one was willing to predict when the last bullet would be fired.

"We are doing the mopping-up operations," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. Earlier, he said: "Suicide cadres are coming in front of troops in the frontline and exploding themselves."

The final battle picked up speed after the last of 72,000 civilians who have fled over four days were freed, the military said.

The United Nations and others say the Tigers had been holding them as human shields, and warned that they were at grave risk.

Getting an independent picture of events in the war zone is normally a difficult task, given both sides have repeatedly distorted accounts to suit their side of the story and outside observers are generally barred from it.

PRABHAKARAN'S FATE?

LTTE founder Vellupillai Prabhakaran's fate stayed a mystery. Military sources said a body thought to be his was found.

"They are taking the body for checks to confirm it is the real Prabhakaran," a military official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Four other military sources confirmed the account, which Nanayakkara denied.

Prabhakaran single-mindedly built the LTTE into one of the world's most violent armed groups through hundreds of suicide bombings and assassinations, which earned it a terrorist designation in more than 30 nations.

He had long vowed not to be taken alive, and ordered followers to bite cyanide capsules if they were captured.

In less than three years, Sri Lanka's bulked-up military has answered critics who said there was no way to defeat the LTTE, which had carefully crafted an aura of military invincibility.

Troops have seized 15,000 sq km from the LTTE, which it had ruled as a de facto state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and guarded with a standing army, naval wing and even a small air force. The LTTE had called it Tamil Eelam.

The cataclysmic end to the war came after the government rejected calls for a truce to protect civilians, and the Tigers refused to surrender and free 50,000-100,000 people the United Nations and others said they had been holding as human shields.

Each side accuses the other of killing civilians, and diplomats say there is evidence both have done so. The U.N. rights chief on Friday said she backed an inquiry into potential war crimes and humanitarian violations by both sides.

Pathmanathan, who is wanted by Interpol and was for years the LTTE's chief weapons smuggler, said 3,000 people lay dead and 25,000 more were wounded.

POST-WAR BOOST

Former Sri Lanka peace mediator Norway on Sunday said the LTTE had finally agreed to hand over weapons to a third party, something Sri Lanka had ruled out long ago.

A wave of diplomatic pressure from the United States, Britain, France and the United Nations last week, including threats to delay a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, appeared to come too late to stop the final fight.

Sri Lanka's $40 billion economy is struggling with depleted foreign exchange reserves, shrinking export revenues for tea and garments, rising import costs, a declining rupee currency and a balance of payments crisis.

Rajapaksa's government is counting on victory to help boost the economy and win him another term in power.

The Tigers have warned that their conventional defeat will usher in a new phase of guerrilla conflict targeting Sri Lanka's economy, an indirect threat to a tourism sector the government hopes can be boosted after the war.

Rajapaksa kissed the ground after he returned home early on Sunday from an official visit to Jordan, state TV showed.

The Tigers have answered earlier battlefield losses with suicide bombings in the capital, Colombo.

Prabhakaran began his fight for a separate state for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils in the early 1970s, and it erupted into a full-scale civil war in 1983 that has killed at least 70,000.

Tamils complain of marginalisation at the hands of successive governments led by the Sinhalese majority, which came to power at independence in 1948 and took the favoured position the Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government.

(Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Dominic Evans)

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