The Red Cross was in talks with both sides, said Wijeratne, in an attempt to secure safe passage for the sick and evacuate the wounded. The hospital is in territory held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam which is home to tens of thousands of civilians.
The government has ordered civilians to leave the area – the scene of intense fighting over the past two weeks – saying that the war is now at a “decisive stage” and that troops could not guarantee the local population’s safety.
There has been no independent reporting from the frontline, with journalists barred from the area and allowed only to visit “liberated zones” alongside army patrols.
There is little doubt that the Tigers have suffered major military reverses since the Sri Lankan government pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered truce a year ago. The ceasefire had been in effect redundant, but by formally giving up on peace, Colombo signalled that the only solution was military might.
Since then, the Sri Lankan military, buoyed by a budget that sucks up a fifth of government spending, has almost hunted the Tigers to extinction. The army today claimed to have uncovered an elaborate underground bunker complex that was once the “hideout” of the Tigers’ elusive leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.
Just a few years ago, the rebels controlled about 9,300 square miles of territory, running a mini-state in the island country’s north and east. They taxed citizens, ran customs, funded a navy and even issued speeding tickets.
Once boasting thousands of fighters, the Tigers have been reduced to just 600 rebels and confined to an area of less than 186 square miles, according to the army, and have resorted to using the local population of 250,000 as “human shields”.
I think there should be a ceasefire, and all attacks by Sri Lanka must be limited to what is judged ‘proportional’ .
3rd world tribal people + modern weapons = disaster.
I don’t get this proportional stuff. People were complaining that Israel’s response in Gaza was out of proportion. The object of a war is to destroy more of the enemy and it’s property than they do of yours. War is not eye for eye. The Tigers have been picking away at Sri Lanka for years with little effective response.
I helped out for a while after the tsunami and our medical unit became a target for the Tigers. They are simply terrorists and I, for one, am glad they government is finally serious about hunting them down and ridding the country of them. I wish it could be done without civilian casualties but it’s a damned war! People die.
Far as I’m concerned, any ‘nation’ that uses children this way, has no right to survive. Good thing for them I’m not god.
Religion is the root of all evil.
Well amodedoma has just declared no to the Palestinian State. Anyone else?
#6 Lot’s of african countries are in that group too. If a society won’t defend it’s children what will it defend?
#2
Thats the sort of narrowminded xenophobic clap trap that one could only hear from the mouth of a pig-ignorant Irish bog trotter
Arthur C. Clarke picked a great place to retire to. At least it was in 1956, when it was still called Ceylon. It became Sri Lanka in 1972. And the situation there seems to have degenerated ever since they got television in 1979. Clarke died there in March 2008. And I can’t help but wonder if he was their least involved, yet most learned citizen? Well, he wrote entertaining stories. What else could he have done to make the world a better place? Cared, perhaps?
No oil, what war ?
# 8 stalinvlad said, “Thats the sort of narrowminded xenophobic ”
Sorry, happens to be true. Take a people that are just into the Iron age and give them post industrial revolution weapons and you get massacres. It’s best to not mess with less advanced civilizations. Look at sub-Saharan Africa. The Europeans went and started interfering with stone age people. To this day the continent has been messed up.