Amid insisting to the international community it is commited to peace, Sri Lanka’s hardline government is preparing for a protracted war to destroy the Tamil Tigers, reports said this week.
This week news wires quoting a senior official in Sri Lankan defence establishment as saying that the military campaign against the LTTE could last at least another three years.
"Within the next two to three years, we should be able to eliminate them. You fight to win, there is nothing called impossible -- its difficult, but not impossible” the official told several international reporters.
Declaring that the five year old ceasefire agreement between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE as all but dead, the official claimed that the government has both regional and international backing for its military campaign against the LTTE.
His comments echoed President Mahinda Rajapakse’s assertion earlier this month that the government “was not concerned” about the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement which ended several years of bitter fighting.
The defence official said the government would continue with its military campaign whilst seeking a political solution to the conflict in accordance with President Rajapakse’s vow to seek an "honourable peace".
“The security forces are on a strong footing to win the military campaign, but a political solution must be pursued in parallel,” the official said.
He was responding mounting international pressure on Colombo to propose a solution to the ethnic question.
Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama during his visit to Washington in March 2006 suggested that political proposals towards resolving the conflict could be ready in a few weeks.
During a visit to India in November last year President Rajapakse too made a similar promise to deliver a political plan within two months.
However political analysts in Colombo say the hardline government, elected on a platform of a unitary state, is no where close developing a credible solution that would be satisfy legitimate Tamil aspirations.
Many Tamils feel the Rajapakse government is merely paying lipservice to international pressure, whilst focusing on militarily destroying the LTTE – whose armed struggle is spurring pressure for powersharing with the Tamils.
Sri Lanka’s ongoing military campaign began with an assault described as a limited defensive operation to eliminate the risk to Trincomalee harbour posed by LTTE artillery guns in Sampoor.
This stand, adopted to ward off international pressure, underpinned President Rajapakse assertion that there is no war in Sri Lanka.
“There is no civil war in Sri Lanka. What we have is an internal conflict and the current military actions are a defensive operation against the terrorist offensive actions launched by the LTTE,” he told Indian reporters.
As in earlier bouts, the Sri Lankan military has targeted Tamil civilians as means of undermining support for the LTTE.
In the operation to capture Vaharai, the Sri Lankan army blocked food and medicine to the area and used indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombardment of villages, creating a humanitarian crisis.
The LTTE pulled out of Vaharai earlier this month, but the population of almost 80,000 residents and formerly displaced Tamils who moved into the area are still languishing in refugee camps.
Boosted by the territorial gains and emboldened by tacit international support for Sri Lanka’s war efforts, an increasingly confident Army chief, General Sarath Fonseka has vowed to ‘liberate the east from LTTE and then focus on the North.’
During a visit to the Temple of Tooth , the main Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka, to seek the blessings of the Buddhist clergy for his campaign, Gen. Fonseka declared: "after eradicating the Tigers from the East, full strength would be used to rescue the North." he added.
There is widespread acceptance in Colombo that the international community has given a ‘green light’ to the Sri Lankan state to weaken the LTTE before negotiating a political solution with it.
However Sri Lanka’s objective is to use international assistance and support to wipe out the LTTE and preclude the need to accommodate Tamil demands for autonomy.
Tamil analysts point to the similarities between the current government’s twin prong approach towards destroying the LTTE and former President Chandrika Kumaratunge’s protracted ‘war for peace’ as she termed it.
From 1995 to 2002, President Kumaratunge also waged a brutal war in the Tamil areas whilst simultaneously promising to deliver a political solution.
Whilst the fighting raged for seven years with disastrous effects on the Sri Lankan economy, no credible political solution was put forward in all that time.
