Sri Lanka relishing recent gains against Tamil Tigers

Dec. 15, 2007, 5:50PM

Sri Lanka relishing recent gains against Tamil Tigers

But many doubt long war will end anytime soon

By LAURIE GOERING

Chicago Tribune

COLOMBO, SRI LANKA — In its all-out bid to finally defeat the country's Tamil Tiger separatists by military force, Sri Lanka's government has made some undeniable gains.

It has seized the Tiger-held east of the country, sunk supply ships carrying arms to the rebels and, last month, it managed to drop a precision bomb on a meeting in the rebel's northern stronghold, killing the Tigers' top political leader.

The message has not been lost on the rebels: When Velupillai Prabhakaran, the group's brutal and seemingly invincible military chief, recently gave his annual birthday speech, it was from an undisclosed studio, rather than to a public crowd as usual.

"Our army will finish the job in the course of the next year," promised H.M. Kotakadeniya, an adviser to Sri Lanka's defense ministry. "The location of every (Tiger) leader is known to the military."

To many Sri Lankans, however, an end to nearly 25 years of bloody civil conflict looks agonizingly far away. The government's new hold on the east is fragile, and seizing the north, the rebels' dug-in stronghold, will be far more difficult.

Political deal 'unlikely'

The beautiful tropical island's economy is faltering as tourists, spooked by the fighting, stay away and as the government turns to borrowing to fund its military campaign. In the past two weeks, two bombings near the capital — one by a female suicide bomber and another package bomb left in a clothing shop — and a third mine attack on a bus have claimed 34 lives and proved the Tigers, if weakened, still have plenty of capacity to bring the war to the nation's cities.

The rebels are "more constrained and restricted in their ability to launch an offensive or set the agenda than ever before," said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives in Colombo. "But the record of this conflict indicates it's not amenable to a military solution. Taking territory is one thing; holding it is another. Military weakening can only succeed if it's complemented by a political offer."

A political deal, however, has rarely looked so unlikely. The rebels have long insisted they will settle for nothing short of an independent homeland for the country's Tamils, an ethnic Hindu minority. The highly centralized government, backed by the country's ethnic Sinhalese Buddhist majority and particularly Sinhalese hard-liners, says it would be willing to hand over some limited regional power but only once "the terrorist menace is completely eradicated," Kotakadeniya said.

Such tough talk "has created a climate where anybody suggesting peace talks or federalism is identified as a traitor and unpatriotic," Saravanamuttu said. "The government (itself) would be a traitor or appeaser if it sat down to talk."

Civilian death toll up

Signs are already growing that the scaling up of the country's long conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, may soon claim more. In the north and even in Colombo, abductions, disappearances and killings of people thought to have sympathy for the rebel cause are on the rise, human-rights officials say.

The government's rout of Tamil forces in the east has enabled some of the country's half-million conflict-displaced families to begin going home, but many more may be killed or forced from their homes if the government steps up bombing in the north, so far its only effective means of attacking the Tigers in their stronghold.

The government, sensitive to pressure from the international community about the growing civilian death toll from its stepped-up military campaign, says it has worked to limit civilian casualties. But political pressure to fulfill promises and show results is growing.

"Our army could finish the job in less than six months if the constraints of collateral damage were ignored," Kotakadeniya suggested.

The rebels, meanwhile, notorious for filling their front lines with abducted children and teenagers, have stepped up recruitment in advance of an expected army push into the north. And Sri Lanka's seaside capital is a maze of security barriers and sandbagged snipers' nests as concerns grow that the rebels may step up the urban campaign they launched last week.

Another casualty of the military buildup — and the government's need to show that it is winning the war — is the media. Last month, a dozen masked gunmen forced their way into the offices of The Sunday Leader, a prominent opposition paper in Colombo, held the staff at gunpoint and burned the paper's presses.

The weekly had recently exposed ties between the government and a top paramilitary leader in the country, and highlighted failures of the military campaign, including an audacious attack by the Tigers' fledgling air force on a key military supply base in the north.

Other opposition journalists have been assaulted, kidnapped or threatened in recent weeks, to the point that journalists now "are always looking over their shoulder," said Jehan Perera, head of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka.