SRI LANKA: Sri Lanka's civil war has resumed in all but name as Tamil Tiger rebels and the army continued to engage in reciprocal ground attacks and artillery and rocket duels yesterday in which about 50 combatants reportedly died.
Details of the battle focused on Muttur district near Trincomalee port in the island's northeast are unclear, as no independent verification was possible with both sides giving widely differing accounts of casualties and the ground situation.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighting for self-rule in the north and east of the island, claimed to have overrun four army camps and pushed into government territory killing five soldiers and wounding at least 18 others.
Analysts and diplomats in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, said the fighting was the worst since the 2002 truce which lay in "tatters" and was one only in name. Muttur residents said rebels had forced the army to withdraw and had seized control of key areas in the town centre, forcing thousands of residents, mostly Muslims, to seek shelter in schools and mosques.
Eyewitnesses said a steady stream of ambulances made their way out of the area, carrying civilian and military wounded to ill- equipped hospitals. Brig Athula Jayawardena, the army's director of operations countered the rebels' claim of having overrun their positions but conceded that five soldiers had died in the fighting.
He said dozens of rebels had been killed in the continuing clashes centred on an offensive to capture a key reservoir in rebel-held territory that feeds government-controlled villages near Trincomalee.
Last month the Tamil Tigers had surrounded the reservoir they control on the Maavilaru waterway and stopped water from flowing to tens of thousands of civilians, mostly Sinhalese and Muslims.
The military responded with six days of continuous air strikes by Israel-built Kfir fighters on rebel bases before deploying about 3,000 troops at the weekend and launching an offensive to free water supplies.
"Denying civilians water is a war crime," Palitha Kohona head of the government's peace secretariat said. Wars have started over less, he added.
Reports from Trincomalee indicate that the reservoir's gate continue to remain closed.
The government, meanwhile, insists its latest offensive that has claimed nearly 100 lives on either side is not a violation of the four-year-old ceasefire agreement that ended nearly two decades of civil war which claimed over 65,000 lives.
It described the fighting as a "humanitarian mission" to secure the area's water supply and appealed to the Tamils to end hostilities, salvage the ceasefire and resume peace talks. No immediate comment was forthcoming from the rebels, who accuse the government of starting the latest round of fighting.
"It's alarming that the violence seems to be spreading," Thorfinnur Omarsson spokesman for Sri Lanka's monitoring mission which oversees the ceasefire said.
The attacks were a violation of the ceasefire by both sides, he said, but persisted with the belief that it was still not a "full-scale war" as neither side had pulled out of the truce.
The LTTE took up arms in 1983 to fight for an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's 3.2 million ethnic Tamils who they claimed had faced decades of discrimination from the country's 14 million Sinhalese.
Norway brokered a ceasefire in 2002 and initiated peace talks but in recent months all such efforts have collapsed with renewed fighting claiming more than 850 lives, half of them civilians, since December last.