COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s government has denied it is preparing to launch an offensive to drive Tamil rebels out of their fortified heartland in the north — a move analysts warns would exact a heavy death toll.

Speculation has been mounting that the military might push into the dense jungles of the Vanni — as the rebel stronghold is known — after soldiers captured a sliver of rebel territory over the weekend.

Analysts warned, however, that a move to retake the Vanni would be far more difficult — and bloodier — than the army’s recent campaign against the rebels in the east, and the government may not have the military or political strength to pull it off, analysts say.

The government has been sending mixed signals about its intentions in recent days, with Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse saying, “the government is determined to liberate the remainder of the uncleared areas in the Vanni ... the same way it liberated the east,” the government-owned Daily News reported last week.

Other officials quickly contradicted Rajapakse’s comments, saying they were not planning a new offensive. On Saturday, however, government troops raided a pocket of rebel-controlled land just south of the Vanni and captured it the next day.

“We are not on an offensive, we have kept the doors open for peace negotiations,” government security spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said on Monday, adding that the government would not wait forever for such talks to materialise.

“If they will keep on terrorising, we will have to take severe steps to liberate the innocent civilians (from rebel control),” he said.

Rajapakse declined to comment on Monday, saying he was in meetings with military commanders throughout the day.

The Tamil Tigers have been fighting for more than two decades to carve out a homeland for the ethnic Tamil minority in the north and east of this Indian Ocean island nation in the face of historic discrimination by majority Sinhalese dominated governments. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the fighting, 5,000 of them since a 2002 cease-fire collapsed 22 months ago.

The government began a major drive to push the rebels out of their scattered bases in the east and announced in July it had recaptured the region for the first time in 13 years.

Any offensive in the Tigers’ heartland in the north would be far more difficult, especially with thousands of troops still required to patrol the east, analysts said.

“To take it will require a heavy cost, and to hold onto it would be very costly,” said Jehan Perera of Sri Lanka’s National Peace Council, a think-tank.

In the east, the army was aided by the defection of a top Tiger commander known as Karuna, who brought thousands of fighters as well as knowledge of the terrain with him. The rebel-controlled areas were isolated from each other and the region is ethnically mixed.

The Tigers — a cult-like army whose fighters hang cyanide capsule around their necks, preferring suicide over capture — are in firm control of the north, where they hold a fortified, contiguous area that is mostly Tamil and easily resupplied

by its network of smuggling ships.

“We are not operating in the north as we did in the east,” Tiger spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan said, explaining that they could not send reinforcements to their isolated troops in the east.

The rebels are dug into heavily guarded positions in the north, he said in a telephone interview.

“They will see what is waiting for them if they are coming into this area,” he said.

The last time the military pushed into the area was in 1997, when it launched an operation to seize the main road running north through rebel territory. In 1998, the Tigers fought back, overrunning the army base in the northern town of Kilinochchi and killing 900 soldiers. The next year, the Tigers routed the army from a string of bases along the road, killing hundreds of soldiers and forcing those left alive into a hurried retreat.

The Tigers are weaker now and the military is stronger, but any fight in the area would still last for years, Perera said.

“It’s going to be a question not so much of the will of the government ... but whether the economy can bear it and whether the people will be patient,” Perera said.

The rebels will also be far more motivated because they would be making their last stand, said retired Air Marshall Harry Goonetilleke, a military analyst.

He predicted the military would work to consolidate its hold in the Mannar and Vavuniya areas on the southern part of the rebel territory before the heavy monsoon rains hit in October.

India, however, would almost certainly pressure the government to back off a major push north of that area, fearing a flood of refugees heading to the southern Indian province of Tamil Nadu, and mass civilian casualties, Goonetilleke said.

“I think it’s going to be a fight to the finish,” he said of a possible northern offensive. “And a fight to the finish means a lot of people are going to die, and most of them will be Tamil civilians.”—AP