SRI LANKA: Civil war has erupted in all but name in Sri Lanka as Tamil Tiger rebels early yesterday launched fresh attacks on key military targets in the island's north, where more than 800 combatants had died in a week of relentless fighting.
Twenty boats from the Tigers' sea unit attacked a strategic land and naval base in northern Kilaly, off the northern Jaffna peninsula on Wednesday night, triggering a firefight that lasted until dawn, military spokesman Maj Upali Rajapakse said.
He said the navy destroyed three rebel boats and killed 70 insurgents who had supplemented their sea offensive by launching a land attack. About 15 soldiers and sailors also had died, the spokesman said, but did not elaborate.
The Jaffna peninsula, some 300km (186 miles) north of the capital Colombo, is cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka by Tiger-held territory and the military is forced to resupply its troops in the island's northern tip by air and sea.
Between 500 and 600 rebels and about 170 soldiers were also wounded in the fighting, which is the fiercest Sri Lanka has witnessed since the 2002 Norway-brokered ceasefire about which both sides remain enigmatically ambivalent and one that, ironically, remains technically valid and in place.
On Wednesday President Mahinda Rajapakse insisted the government was not at war, and that the country had a right to defend its sovereignty against rebel activities. "There is no war on. What we have done is to take defensive action when we have been attacked. If there is a war, we should be on the offensive," he told newspaper editors in Colombo.
Yet the same day the government launched air strikes on the northern territories controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who have been waging civil war since the early 1980s for a separate homeland for the country's 3.2 million minority Tamils, who, they claim, are ruthlessly discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese. More than 65,000 people died in this fighting.
The Tigers did not immediately confirm the casualties in the recent round of hostilities, but each side routinely disputes the accounts offered by the other, making it almost impossible to verify either claims as the troubled region remains closed off to independent observers.
President Rajapakse has vowed that the government will not bow to insurgent demands and withdraw from the Jaffna.