The Ceylon News

COLOMBO (Reuters) -- Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels said they killed 51 soldiers while repelling an army assault, a pro-rebel website reported Saturday, in an account which the military rejected.

The rebel claim comes as Sri Lanka's military, energized by two major strategic victories since the new year, is converging on the Tiger's final strongholds across a small wedge of northeastern Sri Lanka, to finish a war that started in 1983.

With the rebels cornered in a fast-shrinking area with what aid groups say are about 230,000 civilians, the flood of refugees fleeing has increased. The military said 169 went to army-held areas Friday, bringing the total this week to at least 2,200.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) media unit said the guerrillas fought back an advance on Dharmapuram village Friday, killed 51 soldiers and wounded 150, the pro-rebel www.TamilNet.com web site reported.

It published pictures of what it said was one dead Sri Lankan soldier, Tiger fighters on a BMP-1 amphibious armored vehicle and others of guerrillas.

The military denied the TamilNet account.

"Our troops have passed Dharmapuram, so that is not true," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. "In yesterday's fighting the LTTE lost 21 fighters and we lost only seven."

The Tigers had seized a BMP-1 far back in the war, he said.

Air force jets Saturday blasted a defense line near the port of Mullaittivu, which is the last major town the LTTE holds, Nanayakkara said.

Both sides have repeatedly in the past distorted battlefield figures to their advantage, and verification is all but impossible, as the Tigers and the army seal off access to the war zone by independent journalists.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on Friday said it feared for the safety of civilians amid the unrelenting assaults and air strikes. TamilNet has increasingly reported on civilian casualties, but the government denies that.

Friday, U.N. Humanitarian Chief John Holmes echoed the ICRC's concerns about those trapped in the war zone.

"The U.N. calls upon the LTTE to allow civilians to be able to move freely to areas where they feel most secure and for the government to receive newly displaced people according to internationally agreed principles," he said in a statement.

Rights groups have accused the LTTE of forcing Tamil civilians to stay in the war zone to be conscripts or laborers. The LTTE denies that.

The Tigers are on U.S., E.U. and Indian terrorism lists after carrying out hundreds of assassinations and suicide bombings, including against Tamils who challenged them.

The LTTE say they are fighting to address mistreatment of minority Tamils since the Sinhalese ethnic majority took over at independence from Britain in 1948. But many Sinhalese say Tamils enjoyed unfair advantages in colonial times and want them back.

COLOMBO (AFP) – Some 170 people have fled rebel-controlled areas in northern Sri Lanka as fresh fighting erupted across several fronts, the military said Saturday.

It said the 170 men, women and children had sought shelter in government-controlled areas in the north on Friday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Friday warned of a "massive displacement" of civilians, many of whom had already been forced to move numerous times.

"Tens of thousands of displaced civilians are concentrated in an area so small that there are serious concerns for their physical safety and living conditions, in particular in terms of hygiene," ICRC said.

Troops backed by helicopter gunships targeted rebels positions in the northern area of Dharmapuram on Friday, inflicting heavy casualties on the Tamil Tigers, the army said. It said a few soldiers were injured.

There was no immediate comment from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), but the pro-rebel Tamilnet.com website said 51 soldiers were killed in Friday's fighting in Dharmapuram.

"Fifty-one soldiers were killed and 150 troops sustained injuries in the confrontation that lasted for 14 hours from the early hours of Friday," Tamilnet said. It gave no rebel casualties.

The LTTE accused the military of firing artillery shells towards people fleeing rebel-held areas on Friday, killing five civilians and injuring seven, Tamilnet said.

It said LTTE fighters seized weapons after fighting ended.

Meanwhile, ground troops on Saturday captured the northeastern area of Ramanadapuram after several days of fighting, the defence ministry said.

The ministry said airforce fighter jets bombed defence lines in the rebel-controlled Mullaittivu district on Saturday in support of ground troops.

A massive assault by Sri Lankan troops has left the Tigers cornered in their military stronghold in the northeastern coastal district of Mullaittivu.

Sri Lanka has poured a record 1.7 billion dollars into this year's war effort as troops push to eject the Tigers from their last stronghold in the jungle and lagoon district around Mullaittivu.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the Tamils launched their struggle for a separate homeland in 1972 in the Sinhalese-majority island.

Sri Lankan armed forces have surrounded a shrinking number of Tamil Tiger rebels in the northeastern part of the country in a bid to crush the separatist movement and end Asia's longest-running civil war.

On Thursday, the army built on recent advances, taking control of a makeshift airstrip used by Tamil Tiger aircraft in recent bombing raids. The military also captured a village about 12 miles from the remaining rebel stronghold Mullaittivu, said Brig. V.U.B. Nanayakkara, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan military.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE -- the force that has been fighting more than a quarter-century for a separate Tamil state -- now appeared confined to a 230-square-mile wedge just below the Jaffna peninsula. The army is trying to overcome an estimated 1,600 or so remaining Tiger fighters, the spokesman said, compared with about 15,000 in 2006, when peace talks collapsed. "It won't take much more time," he said.

Although the end of a conventional military campaign is within sight, few expect the fighting to stop completely, and many observers continue to call for a political as well as a military solution.

The Tamil Tigers retreat doesn't appear to have ended their ability to carry out guerrilla attacks to advance political goals. Late last month, a suspected Tamil Tiger suicide bomber killed eight people near a market outside the capital of Colombo.

Critics of the government say its fixation on armed force has alienated many Tamils, making it increasingly difficult to resolve the conflict. "The military is capturing territory it has lost, but the government isn't coming up with a political solution," said Rajavarothiam Sampanthan, a Sri Lankan politician who leads a group of pro-Tamil Tiger parliamentarians.

Sri Lankan leaders argue that a military victory against the rebels must precede a lasting peace. On Thursday, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa promised to restore democracy in newly controlled areas and assuage grievances of Tamils, who complain of being abused and marginalized by the country's ethnic majority, the Sinhalese.

"We are not against the Tamil people. We are against terrorists," the president told a group of journalists. "We must understand that this country belongs to the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims and all communities, who have equal rights as citizens of this country, and we will work to safeguard these rights."

The Sri Lankan military campaign, however, has coincided with brutal attacks against government critics. Last week, unidentified armed men shot dead Lasantha Wickramatunga, a newspaper editor known for his critical exposés of the government. Assailants also attacked a private television station, detonating explosives in a studio. A foreign ministry official said the government is investigating the attacks.

The fighting in northern Sri Lanka has displaced hundreds of thousands of the Tamil minority, about 18% of the country's population.

The Tamil Tigers also have come under fire for their abuse of their minority -- who speak their own language and are mostly Hindu. The rebels recruit children to fight, bomb civilian targets and kill political opponents -- including Tamils, according to Human Rights Watch.

The U.S. is among the foreign governments that have declared the LTTE a terrorist organization, but it has also urged a political solution to the conflict.

In recent weeks, the government's military campaign has made big strides. Troops captured Kilinochchi, an administrative center for the Tamil Tigers, and seized Elephant Pass, a key point of access to the Jaffna Peninsula.

The army is trying to lure away the remnants of the Tamil Tiger leadership, Brig. Nanayakkara said. The rebels are offered safety and a livelihood. About 50 have surrendered and been sent to rehabilitation camps, he said.

Sri Lanka is beating the Tigers through military force, not negotiation.

For all those who argue that there's no military solution for terrorism, we have two words: Sri Lanka.

This week, the Sri Lankan army said it had captured the last piece of the northern Jaffna Peninsula, one of the few remaining strongholds of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a terrorist organization that has waged a 26-year civil war that's claimed tens of thousands of lives, including those of a Sri Lankan President and an Indian Prime Minister.

That's a huge turnaround from only three years ago, when the Tigers effectively controlled the bulk of the Northern and Eastern Provinces and were perpetrating suicide bombings in the country's capital, Colombo.

Credit goes to the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has made eliminating the Tigers a priority and invested resources to make it happen. Military spending has surged to $1.7 billion for fiscal 2009, roughly 5% of GDP and nearly 20% of the government's budget.

The expanded Sri Lankan army is now equipped to employ sophisticated counterinsurgency strategies -- such as a multifront attack and quick raids behind Tiger lines. In 2007, the army won its first significant victory by pacifying the Tamil-Muslim-majority Eastern Province, historically a Tiger stronghold. Local and provincial elections were held there last year. The military offensive will now turn to Mullaittivu, the last district controlled by the Tigers in the Northern Province.

This string of victories is a shock to those who thought this conflict, which has political origins, could have only a political solution. The violence started in 1983, ostensibly over Tamil grievances with a Sinhalese-majority government that made Sinhala the country's official language and doled out economic favors to the Sinhalese, who are Buddhist, including preferences for government jobs and schooling. Devolution of power to the provinces has long been floated as the best political fix.

But the Tigers always had other ideas. To wit: They wanted the Tamil homeland to be an independent state with the Tigers at its head. Like other terrorist outfits, the Tigers never accepted the legitimacy of any other group to speak on behalf of their supposed constituents. They were unwilling to accept any negotiated settlement that wouldn't entrench their own power.

That's why earlier efforts to negotiate away Sri Lanka's terror problem failed. In 1987, then-President Junius Jayewardene offered the Tamils a homeland in the north and east that would have given them wide powers, although not a separate state. In the 1990s, another President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, offered another devolution plan. The Tigers refused both offers and the terrorism continued.

In 2002, Norway orchestrated a peace process that resulted in a cease-fire. This time, the Tigers themselves concocted a proposal for a form of regional autonomy in Tamil areas, and the government agreed in principle. Then the Tigers nixed their own deal, betting they could do better with violence after all. They spent the next four years violating the cease-fire.

Repeated negotiations made a settlement harder to achieve. The Tigers gladly murdered moderate Tamil leaders open to genuine negotiations with Colombo. The European Union dithered on declaring the Tigers a terrorist group for the sake of encouraging the peace process, hindering efforts to cut off funding and allowing the killing to continue.

Meanwhile, occasional efforts to subdue the Tigers by force failed through lack of political will or because of outside interference. In 1987, Mr. Jayewardene gained ground in the north, only to be undermined by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who airlifted food to the militants to curry favor with his country's own Tamil population. Then the Indians changed tack, and an Indian peacekeeping force managed to quell the Tiger insurgency for a time between 1987 and 1989. But that operation was derided as a "quagmire" by some Indian politicians. The force was withdrawn prematurely in 1990. Another Sri Lankan military effort, begun in 1995, collapsed in 2000 due to insufficient troop numbers and political meddling in military decision-making.

Mr. Rajapaksa appears to have learned from all this, which is why he has insisted on military victory before implementing a political solution. It helps that India has stayed out this time around and other countries -- including the EU -- are now tracking and thwarting Tiger financing.

Peace still will not be easy or, despite recent good news, immediate. The Tigers may still be able to carry out some terror attacks, though they no longer pose a wide-scale threat. And Colombo faces questions about its commitment to a permanent political settlement. It has taken some steps, such as a 1987 constitutional amendment again making Tamil an official language, and in 2006 it convened an all-party conference to recommend further pro-devolution constitutional changes. It is dragging its feet on implementing other constitutional measures that would pave the way for devolution. But a political settlement is something to discuss after the Tigers have been subdued.

We recount this history at length to make a simple point: Colombo's military strategy against Tamil terrorists has worked. Negotiations haven't. That's an important reminder as Israel faces its own terrorism problem and as the U.S. works to foster stability and political progress in Iraq. Take note, Barack Obama.