KANKASANTURAI: Firing artillery shells towards Tamil Tiger positions as fighting flares despite peace talk pledges, Sri Lankan gunner Herath Rajaratne longs for the day he can return to his family and civilian life.

Stationed in this militarised high-security zone in Sri Lanka’s besieged northern Jaffna peninsula, cut off from the rest off the island by rebel lines, he and thousands of fellow troops live in ghost towns of buildings shelled to ruin during years of past fighting.

Churches and Hindu temples lie crumbled, once-thriving fields are overgrown with grasses and weeds.

Troops live in houses whose displaced owners were long ago forced to flee, sandbag bunkers now dug into their gardens. Prisoners have been brought in from the south to grow their food.

“I would very much like peace to come, but since the Tigers are fighting against us, we have to take defensive action,” Rajaratne said, removing his ear protectors as swirling dust whipped up by volleys of shells roaring towards rebel territory cleared.

“I want to remain in the army until peace comes. Then I’ll be a good father to my children,” the 35-year-old from the north-central town of Anuradhapura added.

“I have an idea for a business. I want to go into cultivation of vegetables and fruit.”

Peace broker Norway says the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have agreed to meet for talks after weeks of the worst fighting since a 2002 truce killed hundreds of troops, civilians and rebels.

But sporadic exchanges of artillery and mortar fire continue on Jaffna peninsula, the birthplace of many top Tiger fighters and regarded as the cradle of the island’s minority Tamil civilisation. The rebels, driven out in the mid-1990s, want it back.

The army has captured Tiger territory on the southern lip of the strategic northeastern harbour of Trincomalee and says it has pushed the rebels back around a kilometre from their forward defence lines in Jaffna.

Emboldened by their successes after a string of failures before the truce, some troops and commanders increasingly feel it is time to take the fight to the Tigers — much to the alarm of the international community.

“Since they have given pressure, we should also give pressure,” said Major Upul Kodithuwakku of the artillery brigade. “Now it is proved that they are not strong. The more we press them, the more they will come to peace talks.”

“I can’t go home while my people lie on the ground,” he added.

The rebels vow there can be no permanent end to a two-decade war that has killed more than 65,000 people since 1983 until the government agrees to their demands for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the north and east — something President Mahinda Rajapakse has flatly ruled out.

The Tigers and government each accuse the other of trying to force a full-blown return to war.

Analysts fear the fighting will grind on. And in the middle, civilians pay the price.

Students like 24-year-old Basyanthiga Vamadevakurukal are fleeing their studies at Jaffna University to escape the fighting, food shortages, curfew and rising killings and abductions.

“We can’t stay here. We are human beings,” she said, dressed in a green salwar kameez, or traditional tunic and baggy trousers, at a transit camp. She is one of a new batch of around 800 people the military is evacuating from Jaffna by boat.

“We don’t know what our future holds,” the ayurvedic medicine student added. “My family already lost everything earlier in the war. Now I’ve wasted three years on this course package.”—Reuters