THE SRI Lankan government ha announced it will no longer use heavy weapons and aerial strikes against the retreating Tamil Tiger rebels in the northeast of the island to spare civilian lives.
However it said yesterday it would continue its offensive to conclusively obliterate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and capture or eliminate its leadership, particularly its head, Vellupillai Prabhakaran.
Defence ministry spokesman Lakshman Hullugalle in Colombo said this only heralded a change in tactics.
He said it was neither a truce nor a cessation of hostilities against the LTTE, which has been waging war for a separate Tamil state since 1983, a war in which more than 70,000 people have died. .
A statement from President Mahinda Rajapakse earlier said “combat operations have reached their conclusion” and the “use of heavy-calibre guns, combat aircraft and aerial weapons which could cause civilian casualties” would cease. “Our security forces will confine their attempts to rescuing civilians who are held hostage and give foremost priority to saving them,” it added.
The pro-rebel TamilNet website, however, reported that aerial strikes were continuing, but no confirmation was possible as neither independent observers nor journalists are permitted in the conflict zone.
The government ignored international appeals to halt the military offensive in order to provide badly needed humanitarian aid to trapped civilians.
The UN estimates that more than 50,000 non-combatants, mostly Tamils, are still trapped in the conflict area, many used by the besieged LTTE as human shields against the advancing army. About 6,500 civilians have died in this crossfire and another 14,000 injured, the UN have estimated.
The Sri Lankan government estimates the number trapped in the fighting at 20,000.
Over the past week an additional 110,000 civilians managed to escape from the sliver of rebel-held territory in the northeast, following the massive military push to wipe out the LTTE, which defence analysts and Sri Lankan specialists say is imminent.
“The Sri Lankan military operations have dealt a debilitating blow to the LTTE from which it will find it near-impossible to recover. It is no more the conventional force it has been the past 10 or 15 years,” said MR Narayan Swamy, author of Inside an Elusive Mind – Prabhakaran, an authoritative biography of the rebel leader.
It was highly unlikely that the LTTE would ever regain the pre-eminence it had when it controlled vast territories in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, running its own administration, judicial, police and revenue systems, he added.
Established by Prabhakaran, the 55-year-old portly Tamilian from Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka in 1976, the LTTE emerged as one of the world’s most efficient, ruthless, committed and innovative guerrilla groups.
It successfully battled the Sri Lankan and Indian armies, and fought one of the world’s longest-running, albeit relatively isolated, civil wars.
Until the daily surge of suicide attacks in Iraq overtook them, the Black Tigers or specialised suicide squads, largely comprising women and children, held the record in their grim specialty with 390 hits and an 80 per cent success rate.
Its targets included a Sri Lankan president, prime minister, defence minister and the country’s chief of army staff. The LTTE, in fact, patented the human explosive belt.
The LTTE is also the only terrorist group to operate a fleet of aircraft and a navy – the Sea Tigers – that included crude submarines, all of which Prabhakaran used to achieve his goal of Eelam or Tamil homeland.
He developed the LTTE’s distinctive operational art and tactical doctrine drawn largely from Che Guevara, Giáp, Mao and Debray and flexible enough to cynically and violently exploit any opportunity that presented itself.
The elusive and enigmatic Prabhakarna, whose goals were dictated only by military considerations, considered anyone not committed to his goal of a Tamil homeland a traitor deserving instant death.