Sri Lanka’s Tamil Rebels Reenter Key City

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka —  Tamil Tiger rebels rolled into the city of Jaffna on Friday, forcing government troops to retreat and marking a tenuous but dramatic victory in this island nation’s long civil war.

Troops with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, fighting for an independent state for minority Tamils since 1983, entered their cultural capital and met little resistance from government soldiers. Sources in Colombo, the capital, said perhaps as few as 200 Tigers moved into the city after crossing the shallow lagoon that separates the Jaffna peninsula from the rest of the island.

“We have reliable reports that the Tigers are inside Jaffna,” a Western diplomat who requested anonymity said Friday. “But this is nowhere near over.”

In their Voice of Tigers radio broadcast, the rebels said they had captured Nedunkulam, an area only half a mile from the center of Jaffna. The Tigers warned residents to leave, and aid workers in Jaffna said throngs of people had begun to flee the city--many carrying all their possessions.

“Our cadres are advancing toward Jaffna city, and at times there will be heavy firing and cross-firing,” the Tigers said in a radio broadcast monitored by Associated Press. “Please go to places of safety, as we can move into the city any moment.”

The government insisted that it still held Jaffna.

Another government spokesman said a Tiger attack had forced government soldiers to “readjust their defenses temporarily” outside the northern city.

“The LTTE does not have large numbers of fighters in the city, and the army is quite confident of holding on,” military spokesman Brig. Palitha Fernando said.

As the Tigers advanced into Jaffna, worries mounted about the safety of Jaffna’s 500,000 civilians. The fighting threatens to spark an exodus of Tamil refugees, who already number about 100,000 in India alone.

“If the LTTE succeeds in pushing the army into the Jaffna area, the war is going to take place in the thickly populated areas,” said Dharmalingam Siddharthan, head of the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam.

If the rebels seize all of Jaffna, it would cap a remarkable string of recent victories by the Tigers, regarded as one of the world’s most ruthless guerrilla armies. In the last month, a small force of Tigers has pushed back thousands of government troops and sent the country’s leadership into a panic.

The leader of Sri Lanka’s opposition party in Parliament confirmed Friday that the Tigers had entered Jaffna. He called the setback the country’s greatest crisis since its independence from Britain in 1948. Ranil Wickremesinghe, leader of the United National Party, said he feared that the 35,000 government troops caught in Jaffna might be massacred.

“This is a huge setback for the unity of Sri Lanka,” Wickremesinghe said.

The battle for Jaffna is considered by many here to be among the most important of the war, which began in 1983 when the Tigers launched their struggle for an independent state. The war pits Sri Lanka’s Tamil and mostly Hindu minority against the Buddhist Sinhalese majority.

More than 60,000 people, many of them civilians, have died in the conflict, which at times has spilled beyond Sri Lanka’s borders. Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was slain by a Tiger suicide bomber in May 1991.

The loss of Jaffna would represent a huge blow to the government’s hope of quashing the rebels. Government troops captured the city from the Tigers in 1995, and President Chandrika Kumaratunga made the victory a symbol of her government’s drive to win the war. As the Tigers have dealt defeat after defeat to the government in recent months, the victory in Jaffna remained the government’s only prize.

Some experts predicted that the Tigers would seek to destroy the Sri Lankan force or push it off Jaffna peninsula by sea or air. From 1990 to 1995, when the Tigers last occupied the peninsula, the military maintained a toehold at the Palali air base about 10 miles north of the city. That allowed the military to eventually recapture the city.

In those days, the Palali base was out of range of Tiger guns. Now the rebels have heavy artillery and can begin shelling the air base. That would make it difficult for the government to hang on.

“It is very likely that the Tigers will occupy the entire peninsula,” Rohan Gunaratna, an expert on the Sri Lankan conflict and a professor at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, said in a telephone interview.

Sources inside and outside the government reported heavy fighting Friday across the Jaffna peninsula, which juts into the Indian Ocean off the southeastern tip of India. The reports, though sketchy, suggested a scene on the battlefield that was changing rapidly.

Ariya Rubasinghe, the government’s chief censor, reported nine Sri Lankan soldiers killed and 86 wounded in fighting, and said that artillery and Russian-made Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships pounded the rebels in a five-hour battle early Friday. Rubasinghe said troops inflicted “heavy casualties among the terrorists.”

A Sri Lankan spokesman said late Friday that its forces had severed the Tigers’ main supply line to the Jaffna peninsula.

“Sri Lankan troops still hold Jaffna,” Rubasinghe said. “Maybe until tomorrow, who knows?”

Tiger leaders in London were unavailable for comment by phone.

As news of the Tiger advances moved through Colombo, the capital’s citizens reacted with despair. Government censorship and a ban on public demonstrations have failed to prevent many Sri Lankans from learning the main developments of the war.

“For the Tamils to raise their flag over Jaffna is a great humiliation for the Sri Lankan state,” said Sunila Abeysekera, a human rights worker here. “It’s crunch time for the Sri Lankan people.”

Several sources said political leaders were shocked by the collapse of the army and were groping for ways to salvage the situation. The Jerusalem newspaper Haaretz reported that Israel, which renewed diplomatic relations with Sri Lanka this month, had agreed to sell Colombo a fleet of combat planes. Indian newspapers said Sri Lanka already had bought seven Israeli Kfir fighter jets and 24 containers of arms and equipment.

Kumaratunga, who survived an attack by a Tiger suicide bomber in December, vowed to hold Jaffna at any cost.

“Your blood is boiling to liberate the Motherland,” Kumaratunga said in a statement published Friday in the Daily News, the government-owned newspaper. “Although we have suffered setbacks during the last few days, let us overcome them and march forward bravely to wipe out LTTE terrorism.”

The rapid-fire success of the Tigers seemed all the more remarkable, considering the small number of troops deployed in battle. The Tigers’ string of recent victories began last month when they overran a huge government garrison at Elephant Pass, a thin strip of land that guarded the entrance to the Jaffna peninsula. According to sources in Colombo, when a force of about 200 Tigers slipped behind the government garrison and cut off a road and captured a freshwater well, nearly 20,000 government troops fled.

Similarly, the Tigers reportedly crossed into Jaffna on Friday with just a few hundred soldiers, moving into an area defended by thousands of government troops. The guerrillas found sections of the town undefended, diplomatic sources said.

The Tigers are believed to number between 7,000 and 15,000, about one-third of them women. The Sri Lankan security forces total more than 100,000. Some analysts believe that the Tigers might have difficulty holding Jaffna because of their small numbers, which have been thinned by years of combat.

Earlier this week, the Tigers offered the Sri Lankan army free passage out of Jaffna. The government refused, and the offer raised questions about whether the Tigers feel strong enough to engage the army in a head-to-head battle.

But the Tigers have routed the Sri Lankan army in recent months because they are better armed, better trained and have a great fighting spirit. Such factors could prove decisive in deciding the outcome of the island’s long war.

“It is not the number of soldiers that win battles, but the morale and the motivation,” said Gunaratna of St. Andrews. “And you can see very clearly that there is a lack of motivation and will in the Sri Lankan army.”

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The Battle for Jaffna

Tamil Tiger rebels entered the city of Jaffna, meeting little resistance from government soldiers. Sources in Colombo said as few as 200 Tigers had moved into Jaffna, forcing federal troops to retreat.

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Source: Compiled from AP and staff reports