COLOMBO: In a move that analysts point out has great symbolic value, President Mahinda Rajapakse’s second son Yoshitha joined the Sri Lankan Navy last week amid much media attention.
Yoshitha Rajapakse’s joining of the Navy comes as the Sri Lankan military vowed to flush out the LTTE from the east of the country as fresh clashes began in the eastern Batticaloa district displacing over 30,000 people, according to latest statistics.
Full scale fighting broke out early last week in Vakarai and areas around Kathiraweli in Batticaloa as the military sought to push the rebels out of their strongholds in the region. The move comes four months after the LTTE was ousted from their previous eastern rebel base, Sampur in the Trincomalee district.
Meanwhile analysts say the death of top peace negotiator of the Tamil Tiger rebels would dampen the country’s chances of renewing peace negotiations with the guerillas who are fighting for a separate north eastern state in Sri Lanka.
Anton Balasingham, domiciled for the past 20 years in England died last Friday in London of cancer.
Functioning as theoretician for the LTTE for the past 30 years, Balasingham, who was buried in London on Wednesday, was considered by many to hold ‘some personnel moderate views’ on the Tamil cause.
Mourning the death of his confidante and mentor, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, a school dropout who considered Balasingham his ‘one man university’, last week re-iterated his call for a separate Tamil homeland.
“I find Bala annai’s death unbearable to accept. It is crushing everything inside me and is breaking my heart,” Prabhakaran said, going on to end his emotional condolence message with the line: “Tamileelam homeland, is the LTTE’s passion.”
With the closing of the Anton Balasingham chapter of the LTTE many analysts fear that there would now be a full scale unleashing of the flood gates of terror by the guerilla leader.“Neither the LTTE nor the government has officially backed out of the peace process but the Sri Lankan government has approved a defence budged of Rs130 billion. This could only mean that the government is also thinking strongly on a long term undeclared war,” a defence analyst said.
Diplomats involved in the Norwegian-backed peace process meanwhile say they do not expect the government or the LTTE to ‘officially’ move out of the ceasefire agreement signed in February 2002.
“The ceasefire, at least on paper, is still on and we have not given up trying our best to make the two sides reach a permanent peace,” a Norwegian diplomat said.
Despite re-imposing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) earlier this month the government insists it had not annulled the ceasefire agreement under which the PTA was temporarily suspended.