Sri Lankan jets strike as troops advance on Tigers
COLOMBO, July 30: Sri Lankan troops on Sunday began their first deliberate advance on Tamil Tiger rebels since a 2002 ceasefire, moving to secure a rebel-held water supply and using air strikes to hold off rebel reinforcements.
More than 800 people have been killed so far this year, and the rebels’ closing of a water channel from an eastern rebel-held area to government-held farms prompted a surge in violence in recent days including air and artillery strikes.
Ground forces were sent on Sunday to secure the channel that irrigates farms in the area, south of the northeastern port of Trincomalee, most of them owned by ethnic majority Sinhalese.
The government said the troops came under mortar fire from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) but none were wounded.
“The LTTE are trying to move reinforcements to the area,” government minister and spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said.
“We are not bombing the roads or the bridges but areas where we believe their fighters are. This is purely a humanitarian operation.”
The Tigers said they knew nothing of any bombing but had been under continuous artillery fire in the east all day.
They said they suffered no casualties on Sunday but lost eight fighters to an air strike on Saturday.
The government put rebel deaths much higher.
As night fell, the army said the advance had slowed with soldiers still well short of the sluice gate and picking their way cautiously through minefields and booby traps.
A spokesman said they might not reach their objective until morning.
The rest of the island was largely quiet, with one soldier wounded in a suspected rebel ambush elsewhere in the north.
In recent months, the mainstream Tigers and the Karuna group of breakaway ex-rebels have raided each other’s positions in the east, and at least 12 soldiers and four rebels died in a clash earlier in July.
There has been little serious infantry action.
Both the government and the Tigers claim control over the site of the reservoir, which lies in an area where the border is ill-defined.
The reality on the ground was that the LTTE controlled the area, military sources said.
The Tigers, who want a separate ethnic Tamil homeland and pulled out of peace talks in April as violence soared, deny shutting the sluice gate themselves and say it was done by local Tamil civilians angry at the government.
Local Tiger political leader S. Elilan said the rebels had not yet observed any army movement but urged government troops not to enter their territory.
“If the military intend to advance into our area then they will see the consequences in a very strong manner,” he told Reuters.
Norwegian peace envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer is due to visit the island this week to try to revive the peace process, but the Tigers have demanded the withdrawal of most of an unarmed Nordic ceasefire monitoring mission after the European Union listed the Tigers as terrorists, and few are optimistic.
Diplomats fear that, without new talks and with world attention focused on Lebanon, Sri Lanka could see a resumption of the two-decade-old civil war that has already caused more than 65,000 deaths on an island also hit by the 2004 tsunami.—Reuters
