Sri Lanka rebels halt eastern offensive: Source

Colombo, Aug 5: Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers said today they had halted an offensive on a government-held town in east Sri Lanka and were pulling back to their positions -- which the military said would bring a ceasefire if true.

The pull-back comes after days of shelling and mortar bomb and artillery duels around the eastern town of Mutur, which was infiltrated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels.

''The offensive operation in Mutur has stopped and the LTTE is going back to its former positions its our own territory,'' a Tiger source told Reuters on condition of anonymity. ''There is no ceasefire yet.'' ''It was a limited operation, and we are doing this on humanitarian grounds,'' the source added, saying the Tigers want thousands of Muslims who fled yesterday to return home.

The military said they would reciprocate the gesture if the Tigers kept their word, but said the army continued to fire artillery at Tiger positions and that the rebels were firing mortars.

''If the pull out is true, we will reciprocate very positively,'' military spokesman Maj. Upali Rajapakse told Reuters. ''If that is the move of the Tigers, all the guns would become silent. That would be a ceasefire.'' He said Tigers fired mortar bombs before dawn at an air force base further south, in the district of Batticaloa, but that troops retaliated and the rebels were driven back.

The navy said it believed it killed around 150 Tigers during a battle for control of a jetty in Mutur yesterday, but analysts say the two sides vastly inflate enemy death tolls as a propaganda war rages.

The Tigers say 12 of their fighters were killed during the entire offensive on Mutur.

Water war

Troops were still clearing newly laid landmines from around a sluice gate the government accuses the rebels of blocking to choke the flow of water to majority Sinhalese farmers, which sparked the fighting in the first place.

The fighting has been the most intense and prolonged since a 2002 ceasefire. Diplomats and analysts say the truce holds only on paper and that a two-decade civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people since 1983 has resumed.

Aid workers said around 7,000 of an estimated 20,000-30,000 mostly Muslims from Mutur had arrived at the government-held town of Kantale around 30 km southwest.

The military put the overall figure of displaced at around 11,000-15,000, and said several thousand stragglers would be brought to the town today.

Rauf Hakeem, leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, said survivors told him five people were killed when suspected government artillery hit a rebel checkpoint that fleeing civilians were passing through yesterday. He said between 3,000-4,000 families were still trapped in Mutur town.

Well over 800 people have been killed so far this year in escalating attacks and military clashes. The Tigers are furious at President Mahinda Rajapakse's rejection of their demand for a separate homeland for ethnic Tamils in the north and east.

The government insists it is committed to the 2002 truce.

''The government can play with semantics, but it's hard to see what's going on as anything but a war,'' said one Western diplomat.

Visiting Norwegian special peace envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer headed to the island's northern army-held Jaffna peninsula to meet civic leaders, and is due to meet the Tigers' political leadership in their northern base of Kilinochchi on Sunday.

However his visit is to discuss the future of Nordic truce monitors after European Union member nations decided to pull staff out in the face of a rebel ultimatum, and analysts say any return to peace talks is a dim and distant prospect.

Reuters

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