Lanka bombs Tigers for 4th day; monitors in crisis

Colombo, July 29: Sri Lankan Air Force jets bombed Tamil Tiger positions in the island's restive east for a fourth day today in a battle over water supplies, the rebels said, as Nordic truce monitors faced crisis after member-nations quit.

Military officials said an operation to clear access to a sluice gate, which they accuse the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of blocking to choke water supplies to Sinhalese farmers on government land, was underway but gave no details.

A Reuters photographer in the eastern district of Trincomalee heard the bombers fly overhead and heard the explosions.

''The army started shelling us this morning, and then the bombers arrived,'' said S. Elilan, head of the Tigers' political wing in the district. ''They bombed near the water tank, but people have already moved away from there, so there were no injuries.'' Elilan said rebel fighters chased away army ground troops as the sides battled with mortars yesterday, but the military denied ground troops had approached the area from a camp 5 km away.

Hardline Buddhist monks in saffron robes who hate the Tigers and are allied to President Mahinda Rajapakse are trying to reach the sluice gate themselves.

Many observers fear the fighting could spiral out of control, rupture a 2002 truce and restart a two-decade civil war that has already killed more than 65,000 people.

Analysts and diplomats worry an exodus of truce monitors from Finland and Denmark after the rebels issued an ultimatum in the face of a European Union terror ban could create a dangerous vacuum and make the situation even more volatile.

The Tigers demanded monitors from European Union states Sweden, Finland and Denmark quit the 5-nation Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) by September 1 after the EU listed them as terrorists alongside al Qaeda.

The Finns and Danes said they had been left with no choice but to remove 22 monitors between them in the absence of security guarantees. Sweden has not yet decided.

Their exit will badly hamper the mission at a time when it is monitoring the bloodiest period since the ceasefire. More than 800 people, most of them civilians, have been killed so far this year.

''With these countries out, it reduces the mission by more than a third and is a serious task to solve,'' said SLMM spokesman Thorfinnur Omarsson. ''We will wait to get a final decision from Sweden. Then it is in the hands of Norway and Iceland.'' ''It's a question of how we can have the manpower to keep the operation functioning,'' he added. ''One option is to get additional countries involved.'' Sri Lanka's strained peace process is deadlocked.

The Tigers have pulled out of peace talks indefinitely, Rajapakse has rejected their demand for a separate Tamil homeland outright, and analysts and diplomats widely fear it could take years to seal a final peace deal.

Reuters

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