Kumaratunga govt urged

Kumaratunga govt urged
Agencies

Colombo, Jan 4: Urging the government to reciprocate the ceasefire offer of the banned Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), various opinion groups have asked the warring parties to end the 18-year-old ethnic war that has claimed more than 60,000 lives.

The peace support group (PSG), made up of 11 intellectuals, has in a joint appeal, called upon the government and the LTTE to immediately start talks with international facilitation and take steps to create a conducive climate for peaceful resolution of the conflict.

They also asked the government to stop the increasing extra-judicial killings.

The LTTE was asked to extend the parametres of its ceasefire to include all acts of hostilities against civilians and non-military targets.

The National Peace Council and 11 Tamil parties have also put out a similar appeal.

``Whatever the motivations behind the ceasefire offer... it is not to be lightly rejected. It offers a new space and a new opportunity for non-violent forward movement towards peace talks,'' it said in a statement. The continuing war was destroying the country, causing poverty and its people were suffering, the council said, appealing to the government to reconsider its rejection of the unilateral ceasefire.

The government had rejected it saying the offer had not been routed through the Norwegian facilitators and was, therefore, outside the Norwegian-facilitated peace process.

Deputy Defence Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte has made it clear that reduction in military action and a ceasefire would be considered only if the LTTE proved its sincerity in attending peace talks.

The Peace Council asked the Norwegian facilitators to intervene in a manner, so as to utilise this opportunity to make both parties agree to cessation of hostilities.

The Tamil political parties, have meanwhile, said that they would launch a movement with the support of human rights organisations and NGOs to stop the war.

Telo leader S Srikantha said they had written to the envoys of India, US, Britain and the European Union in this regard.

``We have received a response from the US Embassy and are meeting the Ambassador on Friday,'' he said. The parties said they were for a political solution within a united Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile, a dramatic escalation in Sri Lanka's ethnic war last year left almost 4,000 dead, the military today said taking the estimated death toll from the 18-year conflict to 64,000.

``Between January and December last year the security forces lost 1,464 troops, including police and paramilitary forces, and the number of terrorists killed was 2,433,'' military spokesman Brigadier Sanath Karunaratne told Reuters.

There was no comparable data for previous years, but an estimated 60,000 people were killed in fighting up to the end of 1999.

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said in November they had lost 16,333 guerillas since they launched their bloody campaign in 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils in the country's north and east.

About 18 per cent of Sri Lanka's 19 million people are Tamils.

Military records showed nearly 9,000 troops, about a tenth of the army, were wounded during the year, but Karunaratne said about 40 per cent sustained only minor injuries and were able to return to the front.

``Even if you take the army's figures as gospel truth, the casualties are appalling for a year of stalemate,'' said a senior retired military officer. Both sides sustained their heaviest losses in the Northern Jaffna Peninsula, where the battle for territory has been in a state of constant flux.

Having vowed to capture the Peninsula by end of the year, LTTE launched a massive offensive from March to May, putting the army to flight and taking a large swathe of the Peninsula, including some suburbs of Jaffna city, under rebel control.

The army also suffered its worst-ever defeat when the rebels captured the huge military base which guarded the Peninsula's strategic Elephant Pass Isthmus Gateway, forcing the government into an arms-buying spree that blew a hole in its defence budget.

But boosted by the new ships, tanks, planes and changes to its high command, the army turned the tables and rolled back some of the rebel gains in a series of small but strategic offensives which began in September.

Last year's fighting also took the war's destructiveness to a new level, largely due to the use by both sides of Czech-built multi barrel rocket launchers which, together with long-range artillery, pounded large areas of Jaffna to rubble.

The artillery duels also accounted for many of the civilian casualties -- 87 dead and 566 wounded during the year -- and left thousands of people homeless.

Since the government offensives started in September, about 1,000 soldiers and rebels have been killed.

A Norwegian peace initiative which gathered momentum as the year drew to a close and a unilateral month-long rebel truce which the government rejected have so far had little effect on the ground.