COLOMBO, 22 December 2005 — Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels killed two Sri Lankan soldiers and wounded nine others in a series of attack in the government-held north, the army said yesterday, as prospects for direct peace talks looked increasingly remote.
Angry minority Tamil protesters and troops have clashed repeatedly this week on the Jaffna Peninsula, a heavily defended army enclave hemmed in by Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) lines, with each side saying the other was trying to escalate the situation.
“LTTE is determined to uphold the cease-fire agreement, but the Sri Lankan Army is continuously ignoring the cease-fire agreement and are committing serious violations, such as rapes, violent attacks and humiliating treatment of Tamil civilians,” the rebels’ website quoted Jaffna political head Illamparuthy as telling Nordic truce monitors.
Sri Lankan Parliament voted yesterday to extend the island’s state of emergency — first imposed after the foreign minister was assassinated by suspected rebels in August — for another month.
The army said rebels were occasionally shooting openly across no-man’s land.
The violence comes after 14 soldiers died earlier this month in two claymore fragmentation mine attacks in the area in the biggest breaches so far of the 2002 cease-fire.
One soldier was wounded yesterday after several shots were fired from behind rebel lines near Jaffna, an army spokesman said, while another was shot dead in a bunker in the town itself. “This isn’t a cease-fire,” said a Colombo-based foreign diplomat. “But there’s still a big gap between this and a full-scale war.”
The rebels deny involvement in the attacks, as well as other recent incidents including an apparent attempt last week to shoot down a military helicopter, but few believe them.
At a meeting in Brussels earlier in the week, key Sri Lankan donors Japan, the United States, the European Union and Norway warned the rebels that they must halt their “campaign of violence” or face “serious consequences”.
The rebels have rejected a Japanese offer to host talks in Tokyo and officials say the government is unlikely to give in to Tiger demands that negotiations be hosted by peace broker Norway.
Diplomats say Norwegian mediator Erik Solheim and Japanese peace envoy Yasushi Akashi both met separately with chief rebel negotiator Anton Balasingham in London after the Brussels
meeting, but with little progress.
The diplomats say Balasingham said the rebels wanted peace, but he was also accusing the army of human rights abuses in Jaffna and wanted troops pulled back. That demand is repeated by groups in the north who analysts say are almost certainly rebel fronts.
