Sri Lanka rejects rebels’ call for truce

THE Sri Lankan government, under intense pressure to prevent civilian deaths, said yesterday it would immediately stop air strikes and artillery attacks, but rejected calls for a ceasefire in its war against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

The effect of the decision was not immediately clear. The military says it stopped using such weapons weeks ago, but a rebel official said government air strikes continued even after the decision was announced.

Reporters are barred from the war zone.

The statement came a day after Sri Lanka brushed aside the rebels’ call for a truce as a desperate ploy by the beleaguered insurgents to avoid certain destruction. The rebels and tens of thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians remain cornered in a small strip of land along the north-east coast.

The UN says nearly 6,500 civilians have been killed over the past three months, and top international diplomats have pressed for a humanitarian truce to allow the remaining non-combatants trapped in the area to flee.

The government said in a statement yesterday “that combat operations have reached their conclusion,” and it instructed the military “to end the use of heavy calibre guns, combat aircraft and aerial weapons which could cause civilian casualties”.

The government, which accuses the rebels of holding the civilians as human shields, said it would continue its efforts to free them.

The decision was surrounded by confusion.

Military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said the military had ceased using the weapons weeks ago to avoid endangering civilians.

“We didn’t use air [strikes], we didn’t use [heavy] guns, we didn’t use tanks. We used only small arms,” he said.

But rebel spokesman Seevaratnam Puleedevan told the TamilNet website that the military had launched two air strikes in the small coastal village of Mullivaikal even after the announcement and accused the government of “deceiving the international community”.

Government officials declined to elaborate further on the statement, but another statement posted on the Defence Ministry website said Sri Lanka planned to press ahead with its offensive. “Security forces are now reaching victory... and in no form will leave a breather for the internationally banned terrorist outfit or its leaders.”

Meanwhile, the top UN humanitarian official, John Holmes, met with Sri Lanka’s foreign minister yesterday to express concern for the estimated 50,000 trapped civilians amid reports of growing cases of starvation and casualties among the population. He then visited a village south of the war zone to inspect displacement camps overwhelmed by the massive influx of war refugees.

The British government also said it was sending foreign secretary David Miliband to Sri Lanka with his French and Swedish counterparts tomorrow to attempt to mediate the conflict and address the dangers faced by civilians. Sri Lanka has rejected previous British mediation offers.

Government forces stand poised to crush the rebels and end this Indian Ocean island nation’s quarter-century civil war. A recent government offensive forced the rebels out of their strongholds in the north and cornered them in a narrow coastal strip less than four miles long.

Expressing concern for the civilians, the rebels declared a unilateral ceasefire on Sunday, saying all offensive military operations would “cease with immediate effect”.

They asked the international community to pressure the government to halt its offensive as well, saying the “humanitarian crisis can only be overcome by the declaration of an immediate ceasefire”.