Tamil Tiger rebels today claimed they would lay down their arms in an effort to stop the government offensive in northern Sri Lanka.
Rebel official Selvarasa Pathmanathan said in a statement that the group had no option left to protect the civilians in the area but to stop fighting.
He appealed to the government to reciprocate and enter peace talks. The government says it has surrounded the remaining rebels in a tiny patch of land and is on the verge of routing them.
The offer to lay down arms came as the last remaining civilians trapped by fighting in northern Sri Lanka poured across the front lines.
“This battle has reached its bitter end,” Pathmanathan said in a statement. “It is our people who are dying now from bombs, shells, illness and hunger. We cannot permit any more harm to befall them. We remain with one last choice - to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns.”
There was no immediate government response, but Sri Lankan officials have repeatedly ignored rebel calls for a ceasefire in recent months.
Tamil Tiger leaders remain at large today after the president declared victory in his nation’s quarter-century civil war with the rebels. The army said its 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.
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, the spokesman said.
Rights groups say the rebels were holding the civilians as human shields to blunt the government offensive. The rebels denied the accusation.
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.
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, however, 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 had earlier insisted that if they are defeated in conventional battle, they would return to their guerrilla roots.
The UN says 7,000 civilians were killed and 16,700 wounded from January 20th to May 7th. 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.
PA