Guerrillas attack navy camp in northern Sri Lanka
Guerrillas attack navy camp in northern Sri Lanka
COLOMBO (Agencies): Tamil Tiger rebels attacked a northern navy camp on Tuesday in a lightning advance to retake their former capital of Jaffna as pressure grew on the government to seek military help from neighboring India and the United States.
The rebels, who had overrun the key Pallai military base over the weekend, unleashed an intense artillery barrage on the navy camp in a strategy to control the sea supply route, military officials and rebel sources said.
The Defense Ministry in Colombo said the soldiers were defending the camp barely 25 kilometers south of Jaffna.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga held a crisis meeting with her main political opponent here on Tuesday as Tamil Tiger guerrillas escalated attacks in the northern peninsula of Jaffna.
Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe said he held an hour- long meeting with Kumaratunga, who is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, as heavy fighting raged near another coastal base in the peninsula.
"The President briefed us on what is going on in Jaffna," Wickremesinghe said shortly after his meeting. "The President told us the situation is critical."
He said they did not discuss the possibility of Sri Lanka seeking foreign assistance in the face of the rebel advance in the peninsula which government forces had wrested control from the Tiger rebels in December 1995.
Meanwhile, The National Sangha Council, a group of powerful Buddhist monks, demanded that the Indian military should intervene to prevent the fall of Jaffna to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The monks, who are extremely influential in a country where 76 percent of population is Buddhist, had met the Indian envoy over the weekend and appealed for Indian military help, local officials said on condition of anonymity.
They had strongly protested when Indian troops were sent to Sri Lanka to disarm the LTTE under a peace accord with Colombo in 1987. The Indian troops withdrew three years later after the government opposed their stay. India is home to 52 million Tamils who have ties with Sri Lanka's 3.2 million Tamils.
"SOS", screamed a front-page headline in The Island, a pro- opposition newspaper. The editorial said there was an immediate need to seek foreign assistance if Jaffna was to be saved.
"The government should make its first appeal to India. India may have good reasons to be reluctant to get involved in Sri Lanka. But Indians cannot remain aloof to what is happening across a few miles (kilometers) of sea on its southern coast."
The paper said Washington has banned the LTTE as a terrorist organization. "Should it not help a country which it accepts to be a democracy struggling against a terrorist organization?" There was no comment by the U.S. embassy.
The Indian embassy too did not react to the demand for an Indian intervention. But an official said Indian ambassador Shiv Shankar Menon has left for New Delhi for consultations.
There has been no official Sri Lankan request either to New Delhi or Washington.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said the rebels handed over the bodies of 42 government soldiers killed in Sunday's battle.
The military said 14 officers and soldiers were killed and 222 others were wounded in the battle. The rebel's clandestine Voice of Tigers Radio said Tuesday that 10 of their combatants were killed in the fighting.
Independent confirmation of the claim was not possible was not possible as journalists are barred from the war front and telephone links to the area have been cut.
The guerrillas have been fighting since 1983 to carve out Eelam, a homeland where they say the nation's minority Tamils will not be discriminated by the Sinhalese majority.