Sri Lanka's president has said a military offensive to crush Tamil Tiger rebels would go on, rejecting the struggling separatists' call for a truce.
The Tigers are cornered in 25 square km (10 sq miles) of northern Sri Lanka, encircled by an army fighting to end Asia's longest-running civil war.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa rejected reports that the military would consider a "humanitarian pause". The United Nations wants civilians and others say are being kept as a human shields by the Tigers to be allowed to flee.
"We will not cave into pressures from any international quarters, locally and internationally, and will not stop until the war was completely over," Rajapaksa said in a statement.
The government has repeatedly said it will not stop until the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) surrender or die, and accuses rights groups, the United Nations and others who say too many civilians are being killed of parroting Tiger propaganda.
The Tigers on Tuesday accused the international community and the United Nations of maintaining a double standard by saying the rebels should comply with humanitarian law, while ignoring what it says are attacks on civilians by the Sri Lankan military.
"The UN cannot even rein in their member state from killing civilians in their thousands on a daily basis," the LTTE said in a statement. "Now we are also fighting for our very survival, our lives, our livelihoods."
The pro-rebel www.TamilNet.com quoted the LTTE's new head of international diplomatic relations as saying the Tigers wanted a truce.
"The international community should play a positive role, promoting a conducive environment for negotiations to take place between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, as equal partners," TamilNet quoted S. Pathmanathan as saying.
Pathmanathan is the Tigers' new diplomatic point man but diplomats say he is wanted by Interpol and for years ran the LTTE's weapons smuggling network.
Colombo has already objected to foreign diplomats contacting him and says the Tigers cannot be on equal footing because they are on US, EU, Indian and Canadian terrorist lists. The government says the Tigers in the past have repeatedly used ceasefires to regroup and buy time to re-arm.
Pathmanathan rejected both allegations, telling TamilNet that "it has been the choice of the people to remain where they are".
He also said the Tigers were not near defeat.
"It is wrong to assume that the LTTE is in a weakened position," he said. "To believe that the LTTE is a spent force is not correct."
The Tigers have waged war since 1983 to create a separate nation for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, which complains of mistreatment at the hands of successive governments led by the Sinhalese majority since independence from Britain in 1948.
Reuters