The Tamil Tigers conceded defeat in Sri Lanka’s 25-year civil war yesterday, after launching waves of suicide attacks to repel a final assault by troops determined to annihilate them.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa had declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) the day before, even as combat raged in the northeast and the military said it was freeing the last of thousands of trapped civilians.
By noon yesterday, the military said troops had freed all the civilians being held by the LTTE inside an area that was less than a 1km². A total of 72,000 had fled since Thursday, the military said.
LTTE founder-leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran’s fate remained a mystery, although military sources said a body believed to be his had been recovered and its identity was being confirmed.
The LTTE, founded on a culture of suicide before surrender, had shown no sign of giving up. Suicide fighters blew themselves up on the frontline yesterday morning and more than 70 were killed trying to flee overnight, the military said.
But by afternoon the military said fighting had slowed and the pro-rebel Web site released a statement from the LTTE’s head of international relations saying: “This battle has reached its bitter end.”
“We remain with one last choice — to remove the last weak excuse of the enemy for killing our people. We have decided to silence our guns,” Selvarajah Pathmanathan’s statement said.
Pathmanathan, who is wanted by Interpol and was for years the LTTE’s chief weapons smuggler, said 3,000 people lay dead and 25,000 were wounded.
Getting an independent picture of events in the war zone is normally a difficult task, given both sides have repeatedly distorted accounts to suit their side of the story and outside observers are generally barred from it.
Government forces on Saturday took control of the country’s entire coastline for the first time since war broke out in 1983, cutting off any chance of escape for a militant group whose conventional defeat has been a foregone conclusion for months.
The military has in less than three years captured 15,000km² the Tigers had controlled as a quasi-state for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamils.
The cataclysmic end to the war came after the government rejected calls for a new truce to protect civilians, and the Tigers refused to surrender and free between 50,000 and 100,000 the UN and others said they were holding as human shields.
Each side accuses the other of killing civilians, and diplomats say there is evidence both have done so. The UN rights chief on Friday said she backed an inquiry into potential war crimes and humanitarian violations by both sides.
A wave of diplomatic pressure from the US, the UK, France and the UN last week, including threats to delay a US$2 billion IMF loan, appeared to come too late to stop the final fight.
The Tigers have warned that their conventional defeat will usher in a new phase of guerrilla conflict targeting Sri Lanka’s economically valuable targets, an indirect threat to a tourism sector the government hopes can be boosted after the war.
Nonetheless, people set off fireworks and celebrated in the streets of the capital Colombo yesterday, a day on which the government asked people to fly the national flag in celebration.
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