Sri Lanka hunts rebel leaders

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger leaders remained at large today after the president declared victory in his nation’s quarter-century civil war with the rebels.

Meanwhile troops killed at least 70 rebels trying to escape the shrinking northern war zone early today.

A triumph on the battlefield appeared inevitable after government forces captured the last bit of coastline under rebel control yesterday, surrounding the remaining fighters in a 1.2-square mile patch of land.

Thousands of civilians who had been trapped by the fighting poured across the front lines, the military said.

“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 in Jordan that was distributed to the media in Sri Lanka.

The rebels, who once controlled a de facto state across much of the north, have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils after decades of marginalisation by the Sinhalese majority.

Responsible for hundreds of suicide attacks – including the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi – the Tamil Tigers have been branded terrorists by the US, the EU and India and shunned internationally.

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 forced the insurgents into a broad retreat, capturing their administrative capital at Kilinochchi in January and vowing to retake control over the rest of the country.

The rebels have insisted that if they are defeated in conventional battle, they will return to their guerrilla roots.

Yesterday, government troops sweeping in from the north and south seized control of the island’s entire coastline for the first time in decades, sealing the rebels in a tiny pocket of territory and cutting off the possibility of a sea escape by the rebels’ top leaders, the military said.

Government forces have been hunting for reclusive rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and his top deputies for months, but it was unclear if they remained in rebel territory or had already fled overseas.

Even as Mr Rajapaksa declared victory, the military reported that fighting continued to rage in the north-east war zone. Huge explosions could be heard across the battlefield as rebels detonated their ammunition stocks and artillery dumps, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.

Early today, the insurgents tried to escape from the surrounding troops in six boats across a lagoon.

But army troops thwarted the rebel attempt, killing a large number of rebels, said Brig Nanayakkara.

So far, 70 bodies of rebel fighters had been recovered, he said.

Reports of the fighting are difficult to verify because the government has barred most journalists and aid workers from the conflict zone.

Some 11,800 civilians escaped the war zone yesterday, joining more than 200,000 others who fled in recent months and are being held in displacement camps, Brig Nanayakkara said.

Rights groups say the rebels were holding the civilians as human shields to blunt the government offensive. The rebels denied the accusation.

United Nations spokesman Gordon Weiss said an estimated 20,000 people had emerged from the combat zone in the past few days and were being processed by the government.

“We have no access to that process. We hold grave fears for the safety of the estimated 30,000 to 80,000 people who are still inside the combat zone,” he said.

The UN says 7,000 civilians were killed and 16,700 wounded from January 20 to May 7. Since then, health officials say more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in a week of heavy shelling that human rights groups and foreign governments have blamed on Sri Lankan forces.

The government denied firing heavy weapons and brushed off calls for a humanitarian truce.