SL vows to take control of rebel-held waterway

Colombo, Aug 1: Sri Lanka vowed today to militarily settle a water supply dispute the Tamil Tiger rebels say has reignited a civil war, hours after one of the deadliest ambushes since a 2002 truce killed 17 people.

Military spokesman Prasad Samarasinghe said troops, locked in a battle with the Tigers yesterday that killed seven soldiers and at least three guerrillas in the country's east, would seek to consolidate the area, despite rebel warnings of retaliation.

He said 15 soldiers and two civilians were killed when a suspected rebel fragmentation mine blew up an army bus in the restive eastern district of Trincomalee. The army initially said 18 troops were killed.

''The operation is continuing. Troops will try and consolidate the area in and around the sluice gate,'' Samarasinghe told Reuters.

Troops have had to advance through minefields to reach a waterway the government accuses the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) of blocking to choke the flow of water to 50,000 people living on farmland in army-held territory.

The air force has conducted six consecutive days of aerial bombings on rebel positions in the east.

The two sides have also exchanged mortar bombs artillery fire and analysts say the truce has ruptured and a two-decade war that killed more than 65,000 people since 1983 has resumed.

However, while truce monitors say the ceasefire is dead in all but name and more than 830 people have been killed so far this year, they say it remains intact on paper at least.

The government says it remains committed to the truce, but the LTTE accuses the government of rendering it null and void.

''In reality there is no ceasefire in Trincomalee, but the paper (truce) is still valid,'' Major-General Ulf Henricsson, head of the unarmed Nordic mission that oversees the truce, told reporters late yesterday.

''I still don't believe in a full scale war ... Call it a low intensity war,'' he said The Colombo stock market fell 1.37 per cent yesterday, and traders said the market's direction was linked to the violence.

The Tigers have pulled out of peace talks indefinitely, angry at the government's refusal to grant them a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the north and east, where they already run a de facto state that encompasses around 15 per cent of the island.

Reuters

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