Sri Lanka ceasefire 'void', Tiger official says

COLOMBO - Sri Lanka's four-year ceasefire is now void and the island's two-decade civil war is back on, a top Tamil Tiger rebel said on Monday, as the guerrillas and the military entered a sixth straight day of fighting.

"The ceasefire agreement has become null and void at the moment," S Elilan, head of the Tigers' political wing in the restive eastern district of Trincomalee said by telephone.

"The war is on and we are ready," added Elilan. "The war has begun. It is the government which has started the war."

Elilan is not the Tigers' main spokesman but he is one of the their top officials and their political head in Trincomalee.

Sri Lankan troops began their first deliberate advance on Tamil Tiger rebels since a 2002 cease-fire on Sunday, moving to secure a rebel-held water supply and using air strikes to hold off rebel reinforcements.

More than 800 people have been killed so far this year, and the rebels' closing of a water channel from an eastern rebel-held area to government-held farms prompted a surge in violence in recent days including air and artillery strikes.

The Tigers, who want a separate ethnic Tamil homeland and pulled out of peace talks in April as violence soared, deny shutting the sluice gate themselves and say it was done by local Tamil civilians angry at the government.

Ground forces were sent on Sunday to secure the channel that irrigates farms in the area, south of the northeastern port of Trincomalee, most of them owned by ethnic majority Sinhalese. The government said the troops came under mortar fire from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) but none were wounded.

"The LTTE are trying to move reinforcements to the area," government minister and spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella said. "We are not bombing the roads or the bridges but areas where we believe their fighters are. This is purely a humanitarian operation."

The Tigers said they knew nothing of any bombing but had been under continuous artillery fire in the east all day. They said they suffered no casualties on Sunday but lost eight fighters to an air strike on Saturday. The government put rebel deaths much higher.

In recent months, the mainstream Tigers and the Karuna group of breakaway ex-rebels have raided each other's positions in the east, and at least 12 soldiers and four rebels died in a clash earlier in July. There has been little serious infantry action.

The Tigers want a separate ethnic Tamil homeland and pulled out of peace talks in April as violence soared.

Norwegian peace envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer is due to visit the island this week to try to revive the peace process, but the Tigers have demanded the withdrawal of most of an unarmed Nordic cease-fire monitoring mission after the European Union listed the Tigers as terrorists, and few are optimistic.

The head of the island's Nordic truce monitoring mission said on Saturday the 2002 truce was dead in all but name after fresh fighting so far this year, but said he expected low intensity fighting rather than a full-blown conflict.

Diplomats fear that, without new talks and with world attention focussed on Lebanon, Sri Lanka could see a resumption of the two-decade-old civil war that has already caused more than 65,000 deaths on an island also hit by the 2004 tsunami.

- REUTERS