COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s president said his country has defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels on the battlefield and emerged victorious from its quarter-century civil war as troops seized control of the island’s entire coastline yesterday for the first time in decades.
“My government, with the total commitment of our armed forces, has in an unprecedented humanitarian operation finally defeated the LTTE militarily,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa said referring to the rebels by their formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
“I will be going back to a country that has been totally freed from the barbaric acts of the LTTE,” he said in a speech at an international gathering in Jordan that was distributed to the media in Sri Lanka.
The military reported that fighting continued to rage in the war zone along the northeast coast. Huge explosions could be heard across the battlefield as rebels detonated their ammunition stocks and artillery dumps, military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said. In the morning, soldiers took control of the coastline, sealing the Tamil Tigers in a tiny pocket of territory and cutting off the possibility of a sea escape by the rebels’ top leaders, the military said.
The rebels, who once ran a de facto state across the north, had controlled a formidable navy and sea smuggling operation.
Thousands of people fled intense shelling in the 3 sq. km patch of land still under rebel control. More than 23,000 civilians have fled since Thursday, Nanayakkara said.
Government forces have been hunting for the reclusive Tamil Tiger leader V. Prabhakaran and his top deputies for months, but it was unclear if they remained in rebel territory or had already fled overseas.
The Defense Ministry said the Tigers “are preparing for a mass suicide after being effectively cut-off from escape routes, both land and sea.”
On the verge of battlefield defeat, the rebels reiterated their calls for the government to cease its offensive and restart talks to resolve the ethnic conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
The rebels’ PR incharge, S. Pathmanathan, said the group welcomed US President Barack Obama’s call on Wednesday for a peaceful end to the conflict and would do “anything that is necessary” to spare the civilians. However, he did not specifically say whether the rebels would accede to Obama’s request to lay down their arms and surrender.
Reports of the fighting are difficult to verify because the government has barred most journalists and aid workers from the conflict zone. The rebels have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils after decades of marginalization by the Sinhalese majority.
The group, responsible for hundreds of suicide attacks, has been branded a terror organization by the US, EU and India.
The rebels also controlled a conventional army with artillery units, a significant navy and even a tiny air force.
After repeated stalemates on the battlefield, the military broke through the rebel lines last year and slowly forced the insurgents into a broad retreat.
The government captured the rebel’s administrative capital at Kilinochchi in January and vowed to swiftly crush the group.
Meanwhile, international concern has grown for the tens of thousands of civilians still trapped in the war zone amid the unrelenting artillery bombardments, and the Red Cross has warned of “an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe” for the hundreds of wounded trapped without treatment.
