Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels said Sunday that peace talks with
the government were impossible while the two sides remained locked
in the worst fighting since a 2002 truce.
The government had said it received a message from the Tigers
through ceasefire monitors on Friday, hours before clashes erupted
on the northern Jaffna peninsula, saying that they were keen to
talk.
"We have made no proposals for peace talks," S. Puleedevan, head
of the Tiger peace secretariat, said by telephone from the northern
rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi.
The government had said it was willing to talk.
"We accepted," said head of the government peace secretariat
Palitha Kohona. "The Tigers also wanted to know if there were any
conditions. We said there would be no conditions but since then
there has been no response."
On Saturday the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) broke
through army defences on the army-held peninsula, where some 40,000
troops, mainly from the Sinhalese majority, are based in a
Tamil-dominated area cut off from the rest of the island by rebel
territory.
Telephone contact with Jaffna is extremely difficult. A senior
army source in the area said that the night had been relatively
quiet but that the military had launched an operation around first
light.
The military said government jets went into action after Sea
Tigers attacked positions on a navy-held island. Aid workers
reported heavy shelling, but truce monitors said fighting seemed
slightly less than on Saturday when the army said 27 of its
personnel were killed and 87 wounded.
After early talk of routing the rebels, by the afternoon the
government media office simply said it had lost communication with
the Jaffna troops.
Truce monitors said they believed the LTTE were trying to cut
supply lines to Jaffna, which has changed hands several times in
two decades of civil war that has killed more than 65,000
people.
The birthplace of most of the rebel leadership and cultural
center of their fight for a homeland for minority Tamils, Jaffna
has long been seen as a key Tiger objective. Some diplomats believe
the LTTE want to move closer before going to peace talks.
Aid workers said people inside rebel territory were fleeing
south towards Kilinochchi, some of them sheltering at the roadside
as spotter planes flew overhead.
The first ground fighting since the ceasefire erupted over a
week ago further south, initially sparked by the closure of a
rebel-held sluice gate providing water to government territory. The
Tigers later opened the sluice gates but violence continued.
The fighting has been accompanied by targeted attacks in the
island's south, far from the front. On Saturday, gunmen shot dead
the deputy head of the government peace secretariat Kethesh
Loganathan, an ethnic Tamil.
The government blames the rebels, who have long silenced
dissenting Tamil voices. Loganathan supported the government's
military campaign against the rebels and last week said the
international community was "mollycoddling" the LTTE.
(China Daily August 14, 2006)
