SRI LANKA:Sri Lanka faces the prospect of an all-out civil war after the leader of the rebel Tamil Tigers dismissed the island's peace process as "defunct" and publicly reiterated demands for an independent homeland for his people.
"It is now crystal clear that the [ majority] Sinhala leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question," Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran said earlier this week in his annual "Heroes' Day" policy speech.
"Therefore, we are not prepared to place our trust in the impossible and walk along the same old, futile path," he declared.
The Tamil leader said Sri Lanka's 2.5 million Tamil minority were left with no option but to continue their armed struggle for an independent state. The conflict has claimed nearly 70,000 lives since 1983.
But neither the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) nor the Sri Lankan government forces have formally declared a return to hostilities.
Claiming political, economic and linguistic discrimination at the hands of the majority Sinhalese, the LTTE has been fighting for an independent homeland for Tamils in the north and east of the island for nearly 25 years.
The LTTE has emerged as one of the world's most efficient, ruthless and innovative guerrilla groups that has fought one of the world's longest-running, albeit relatively isolated, civil war. Established in 1976 by Prabhakaran, a 53-year-old Tamilian from Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, LTTE has grown from a guerrilla force to a semi-conventional army.
It specialises in fighting a "mobile war" against the Sri Lankan army's "static war" of digging themselves in camps and waiting for the enemy to strike.
The LTTE chief's declarations on Monday reneged on a four-year-old pledge to accept a federal solution extending broad autonomy to the Tamil-controlled areas in the north and east where the Tamils run a parallel administration. That commitment by Prabhakaran had resulted in a ceasefire and years of Norwegian-brokered peace talks.
Attempts to find a negotiated solution to the Tamil situation have centred on giving the minority community a measure of autonomy within a united republic. But neither side can agree on the contours of the professed autonomy.
When the LTTE produced a plan for an "interim self-governing authority" in 2003, asking for power over taxation, policing, land rights and economic development, Colombo rejected it as "unrealistic".
Soon after, the LTTE and government forces, while formally professing allegiance to the ceasefire, gradually slid back towards all-out war with initial skirmishes erupting into full-blown fighting last December. Some 3,000 people are estimated to have died since then.
Humanitarian agencies claim the conflict has created more than 200,000 refugees.