“People say they'll suffer the hardships as long as the government can finish the war,” said Iqbal Athas, a Colombo-based correspondent for Jane’s Defence Weekly.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) “military machine has yet to be badly dented” and the group may have at least 10,000 fighters.
President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government pledged to defeat the LTTE in the northern Wanni region this year after evicting them from the east a year ago.
The Tamil Tigers operate from jungle bases in the north, where they repulsed a major army offensive in the late 1990s.
Pressure on the government to negotiate with the Tamil Tigers may build if military operations stall.
Workers in ports, transport and agriculture were among those striking over cost of living increases after consumer prices in the capital,
The war is weighing on the economy,
The International Monetary Fund has said the nation's economic outlook “depends critically” on an end to the civil war.
Economic growth slowed for the first time in a year in the first quarter as the escalating violence, including bomb attacks in
“People are expecting the war to be over sooner rather than later,” said Pramod De Silva, editor-in-chief of the state-run Daily News.
“They will welcome either a military or a political solution as soon as possible.”
The military's efforts to control “terrorism” in the north have allowed people in the south to consider strike action, Rajapaksa said in comments, the newspaper reported.
Some groups are using the stoppage to “gain political mileage,” he said.
Losing control of
The Tigers will have a hard time regaining the region, Athas said.
The Tamil Tigers are confined to just two northern districts in
The government is on course to delivering a major blow to the “terrorists” this year, he said.
“Everything is going according to our strategies and plans.”
The Tamil Tigers have lost the ability to fight as a conventional army after being weakened by recent government offensives, Army Chief Sarath Fonseka said earlier this month. The military is making progress toward eliminating the Tigers by mid-2009, he told reporters.
The war may have reached a stalemate, said Athas.
Attacks are on the rise in all three “cleared” eastern districts, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Amparai, and the Tamil Tigers have been “periodically” targeting the northern
The Tamil Tigers have also launched attacks in the Sinhalese-dominated south of the island, demonstrating that they can operate deep within government territory.
Last year, the Tamil Tigers showed they had developed an air capability, using light aircraft to bomb a military base near
The military has targeted Tamil Tiger leaders since taking over the
The LTTE accuses the air force of bombing civilian areas and says the land and air attacks amount to genocide.
The LTTE said last September that any peace process must be based on a homeland for the Tamil people, in the same way the ethnic-Albanian majority in the former Serbian
