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Sri Lanka : Fighting in Jaffna peninsula

	August 28, 2006

Sri Lankan troops and the Tamil Tigers are locked in fierce fighting over Jaffna . The latest fighting which began some two weeks ago despite a truce in place for the past four years, has seen hundreds of combatants killed on both sides. The government troops used artillery and warplanes on the Jaffna peninsula, regarded by minority Tamils as their home. The fighting began when the LTTE launched assaults on soldiers establishing their positions at the Kilaly Forward Defence Line (FDL). A government statement said they were overpowered and chased away with heavy casualties on August 19. A statement by the military said security force members were consolidating their positions at the FDL, an indication that some fighting was still on in the peninsula.



In the week long heavy artillery exchanges and fierce gun battles the Sri Lankan Government said its forces killed 700 Tamil Tigers and lost 106 soldiers and sailors. The LTTE spokesman, however, put their losses at 88 while claiming that the Government troops suffered heavy losses.



With the peninsula virtually cut off from the rest of the world, there is every possibility of a major humanitarian crisis. The area is facing severe shortage of essential commodities and government efforts to ship relief supplies have been hampered by heavy rain. As a result of escalation of hostilities, the monitors of the Sri Lanka Ceasefire Monitoring Mission have temporarily withdrawn to Colombo. The Mission which had been designed to monitor the 2002 ceasefire, has already lost more than half of its 57 members after the Tigers demanded that staff from the European Union States, Denmark , Finland and Sweden, leave after the EU banned them as terrorists.



Commenting on the Jaffna flare-up, the Defence Ministry spokesman said in Colombo, the objective of the Tigers appears to be to take control of Jaffna, and if they cannot go all the way for it , at least they want to make it impossible for the government to maintain supplies to the peninsula. President Mahinda Rajapakse said last week that he would defend Jaffna at any cost. “I cannot hand Jaffna over to the LTTE on a platter and withdraw troops to Colombo. I will not do that under any circumstances,” he said.



The situation in Jaffna has created a serious humanitarian crisis. Tens of thousands of civilians have been on the run, taking shelter in temples and churches. The Army arrested about 85 civilians including women and children trying to flee to Tamil Nadu on a fishing trawler. Some 7,000 Sri Lankan Tamils have already fled to Tamil Nadu this year since the fighting escalated. According to a UN estimate, 1.7 lakh people have been displaced by the fighting . A leading human rights group, Human Rights Watch, in a statement, said, “While tens of thousands of citizens are trapped by fighting in the North, threats and violence against aid organizations have made a bad humanitarian situation worse.” It urged both the Government and the LTTE to act promptly to allow the delivery of food, water and medicines. The Government is attempting to ferry goods to the Jaffna peninsula but a variety of factors, including inclement weather, have held up the ships at the harbour.



For the LTTE, Jaffna is a symbol of Tamil culture and Tamil pride. But for the Government it is the fountain head of Tamil separatism. The security forces gained control of Jaffna 400 kilometres north of the capital from the LTTE after fierce fighting in Dec. 1995 and since then, the region has been an Achilles heel for the troops. The military scored a psychological victory by capturing the former de facto Tiger State but ended up having to feed 3,50,000 civilians and 40,000 soldiers using expensive sea and air transport, both vulnerable to Tamil Tiger attacks. The Tigers control the only land access to Jaffna to link the rest of the island by a narrow causeway. Recent shell attacks on the only airfield at the northern edge of the peninsula cut off the air bridge and placed the troops under siege.



Even as the fighting raged in the Jaffna peninsula, elsewhere too, the Tamil Tigers continue to indulge in terrorist violence. For instance, a suspected LTTE gunman killed a former Tamil Parliamentarian in Jaffna, Sinnatamby Sivamaharajah. He was shot and killed in Tellippalai in Jaffna. In another instance, police in Colombo found a bomb in a basket of vegetables at the back of an abandoned bicycle in Colombo which was defused before it could go off. The Army also claims to have destroyed an LTTE ammunition dump.





Weapons smuggling from US foiled

The LTTE tried to smuggle missiles, missile launchers, AK 47 rifles and other weapons from the United States. But the plot was foiled by the FBI before it could be executed. Thirteen persons have been charged by US officials with multiple crimes including conspiracy to bribe the officials to smuggle weapons and to have the LTTE removed from the US State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Arrested by the FBI on along Island, New York, in a sting operation last week-end, four of them have been accused of trying to purchase from an undercover agent Russian-made SA-18 surface-to-air missiles, missile launchers, AK-47 rifles and other weapons to be used by the LTTE in its rapidly escalating conflict against the Sri Lankan military. Four others have been charged with providing material support to the LTTE that included the procurement of military equipment and dual use technology, fund raising and money laundering through “front” charitable organizations and US bank accounts, according to the US Justice Department.



The investigation was conducted by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force [JTTF] with assistance from more than 20 of its field offices. In the sting operation, under-cover agents posing as State Department officials were offered millions of dollars during a series of secret meetings in a New York city apartment. The key negotiator on behalf of the LTTE was the 54-year-old India-born Nacimuthu Socrates, described in court papers as LTTE supporter based in North America. Socrates is alleged to have tried to bribe a purported State Department official who was actually an under-cover agent to get LTTE removed from the list of foreign terrorist organisations and obtain classified information. The meeting took place in July, 2005 while other defendants were recorded in a separate sting last month negotiating the purchase of 10 Russian-made missiles, 500 AK-47 rifles, and other weapons systems, prosecutors said.



The LTTE has maintained that it has no connection with the eight persons arrested by the US authorities. The LTTE said in a statement, “This is not our way of operating. We have never done like this before.”





Echoes of LTTE in Tamil Nadu Assembly

The LTTE issue echoed in the Tamil Nadu Assembly when furious Congress members flayed MDMK chief Vaiko’s pro-LTTE speech, eulogizing its chief Prabhakaran, the main accused in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a human suicide bomber, and openly admitting to having links with the banned outfit at a public meeting in the city a day before. Raising the issue in the Assembly, Congress member Peter Alphonse said Vaiko had made a highly provocative and dangerous speech, speaking in glowing terms of the LTTE leader who is the prime accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, and openly declaring his links with an organisation which has been banned by the Government of India. He alleged that Vaiko’s speech could pose a threat to “social peace” in the State. Referring to Vaiko’s speech in which he hailed the LTTE’s pro-Eelam [separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka] demand and warned that a Kashmir-like situation would be created if the Government of India was seen helping the Sri Lankan Government, “particularly if the assistance was used to kill the Sri Lankan Tamils”, Congress members asked if the MDMK chief meant that he wanted to turn Tamil Nadu into another Kashmir.



Vaiko’s pro-LTTE rhetoric at the public meeting came three years after his 19-month-long detention under POTA during the previous Jayalalithaa regime, for speaking in support of the terrorist outfit.





Island on the boil

Sri Lanka is on the boil. Apart from the daily diet of killings, bomb blasts, and targeted assassinations, the dimensions of the unfolding humanitarian disaster are alarming. Since the current phase of violence began on July 26, after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam shut down a waterway in the east, hundreds of people have been killed and at least one lakh, by conservative estimates, rendered homeless. The violence has taken a particularly nasty turn as evident in the execution of 17 Sri Lankan workers of a French NGO in Muttur and the murder of the Deputy Secretary-General of the Sri Lanka Government’s Peace Secretariat, Ketheshwaran Loganathan, in Colombo. The 2002 Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), brokered by Norway, has become a mere piece of paper and the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM), formed to oversee its implementation, irrelevant.



Both the Sri Lankan Government and Tamil Tiger rebels might still say they want peace despite a return to large-scale fighting, but in reality they may have got the war that they wanted after four years of ceasefire. Hopes had been high after the Norwegian brokered truce was signed in 2002 – aid flowed in and most diplomats and analysts judged a two-decade war that had killed more than 64,000 people to be over for good, with the LTTE running a de facto state across a seventh of the island. Now, troops and rebel fighters have been in battle for three weeks, first in a small-scale engagement south of the north-eastern port of Trincomalee where the rebels closed off a water supply to government areas, then along other front lines.



“Our assessment is that both sides believe they can achieve things better through military means,” a diplomat said. In fact, few Western experts believe either side can defeat the other. In three weeks of ground fighting, the front lines have barely moved and the action reminds some of World War I. Increased ethnic violence and tension drives many Tamils into the Tiger cause, and also pushes majority Sinhalese towards the Government. Some say that both sides also want to make some military gains as a precursor to new talks. “Eventually, it will have to come down to negotiations”, but first, there will be one big fight”, a political commentator said.



Both sides are blaming each other for the violence. The LTTE appears to have a clear game plan but the question is whether the Mahinda Rajapakse Government has a strategy to thwart the Tigers’ designs. Most of the Government’s actions seem, at best, reactions to particular incidents. Instead of mobilizing available support to take on the LTTE and taking initiatives to resolve the ethnic conflict, the Rajapakse Government’s actions seem to be at loggerheads with well-wishers and supporters of a peaceful Sri Lanka both within and outside. Leave alone trying to get the Opposition United National Party on board its fight against the LTTE, the ruling party has actually accommodated six UNP dissidents in the Government. And, President Rajapakse’s managers do not let go of any opportunity to pin the blame for the current state of affairs on the policies of the previous Ranil Wickremesinghe Government.



The battle of wits between the SLMM and the Government is another area of concern. At least three times since July 26, the SLMM has openly clashed with the Government. The SLMM is miffed at the Government for its aerial raids in the East to force the LTTE to lift the water blockade. This was not the right strategy, it feels. There have been at least two occasions recently when the aerial raids took place when the SLMM chief was in the battle zone. The Government and the SLMM have also differed over the aerial bombing in Tiger-held areas of Mullaittivu district that killed 61 school children and injured over 150. The Government says the raids targeted an LTTE training camp and not a school or an orphanage. The UNICEF and the SLMM, whose teams visited the affected site, have disputed this.



Colombo is in a similar situation vis-à-vis the Lanka Co-Chairs – the United States, the European Union, Japan, and Norway. In a recent strongly-worded statement, the Co-Chairs said they were deeply concerned by the continuing violence, which was seriously unravelling the ceasefire agreement and peace process in Sri Lanka. Their call to both the Government and the LTTE to cease hostilities immediately and return to the negotiating table has not gone down well with Colombo.