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Sri Lanka has offered fresh talks with Tamil Tigers to avert a return to all-out civil war as the top guerrilla leader wrote off the Norwegian-backed peace process.
President Mahinda Rajapakse, currently visiting India, said Tuesday he was ready to have direct talks with Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
“I always tell him why do you need others to get involved in this — let us talk,” Rajapakse said in an interview with India's New Delhi Television.
Prabhakaran, 52, accused the Colombo government of waging war on Tamils under the cover of a 2002 peace agreement.
The 2.5 million minority were left “with no other option but an independent state,” Prabhakaran declared in an annual speech Monday evening.
Asked if Sri Lanka was at war now, defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said in Colombo the government was committed to peace. “We are pursuing peace … But we will respond if we are attacked,” he said.
“We want a clarification from the Norwegians if the peace process is still on.”
The demand was put in writing to Oslo — which brokered the ceasefire agreement in 2002 — along with a letter to the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission of Scandinavian truce observers, asking if the 2002 ceasefire remained in effect, said Rambukwella, also policy planning minister.
The Norwegian embassy in Colombo had yet to receive the clarification request, spokesman Erik Nurnberg said.
Truce monitors met senior LTTE members in the unofficial rebel capital, Kilinochchi, in the north on Tuesday morning, the group announced. No details emerged.
Prabhakaran went back on a pledge to accept a federal solution under which the Tamils would enjoy broad autonomy. He said the truce that came out of the pledge was now “defunct.”
Rajapakse, “by openly advocating attacks on our positions, has effectively buried the CFA (Ceasefire Agreement),” Prabhakaran said.
The guerrilla leader stopped short of declaring independence, but stressed the peace process was over with the Sinhalese nationalist-led government elected a year ago.
“It is now crystal clear that the Sinhala leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question,” he said.
Former Tamil rebel turned politician Dharmalingam Sithadthan saw war on the horizon.
“He has gone for a declaration of war,” Sithadthan told AFP. “All these days what we had was 'undeclared war.'
“Now he is saying that he has ditched the peace process and is taking the 'Eelam' route,” meaning a separate Tamil nation on the Sinhalese-majority island.
“After all-out war, maybe the two sides might come again for talks, it could be in about a year or more,” Sithadthan said.
“He could go in for a big push immediately,” he warned, noting current heavy monsoon weather favoured guerrilla warfare.
Prabhakaran hinted the conflict could resume and urged international recognition of the “freedom struggle … at this historic time when the Tamils are recommencing their journey on the path of freedom.”
The rebels stepped up artillery fire Tuesday against military bases in the east, killing at least one soldier and wounding several others, military sources said.
The artillery duels blocked a much-needed food convoy to some 40,000 civilians trapped by the fighting in the island's restive east, and both sides blamed each other for blocking the supplies Tuesday.
Exactly a year ago, the LTTE commander-in-chief had given the new government one year to find a political solution to Asia's longest-running ethnic conflict.
“He (Rajapakse) rejected our final call … Instead, he intensified the war,” Prabhakaran said.
Prabhakaran's address was closely-watched by Sri Lankan leaders as well as in donor countries who have warned of aid policy reviews if fighting escalated.
A Western diplomat close to the negotiations also saw more bloodshed.
“I would read it as end of the peace process,” he said. “He has set the stage to justify any attacks in the future.”
The conflict has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
