Lanka prepares for war, hopes for peace

Sri Lanka's top military commander, Admiral Daya Sandagiri, (C) speaks to reporters yesterday in Colombo to announce that government forces were ready to meet any "terrorist challenge" after an upsurge in violence that killed 31 people, including 16 troops, in the island, while police chief Chandra Fernando (L), army commander Sarath Fonseka (2L) and air force chief Donald Perera (R) look on. Sandagiri said the military was also keen to uphold a truce with Tamil Tiger rebels.. PHOTO: AFP

Fourteen soldiers were killed in two separate attacks in the minority Tamil dominated north earlier in the week in the biggest breaches of a 2002 ceasefire to date, and the military said the rebels were trying to provoke the army into reacting.

"We have fought some very high intensity battles," said army commander Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, an infantry veteran of the two decades of war that preceded the ceasefire. "Compared to that, this situation is nothing. We don't have any trigger-happy people who will fire everywhere."

The Tigers have denied responsibility for the attacks in the northern government-held Jaffna Peninsula, cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka by the de facto state the rebels control.

But few analysts or diplomats believe them and an organisation labelled a Tiger front group by some has claimed responsibility on the Internet.

Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Daya Sandagiri said troops were alert but that the government was keen to talk to the rebels and did not anticipate a return to the full-scale war that has already killed some 64,000.

"If we have to decide between the ceasefire agreement and conducting an offensive, we are certainly not thinking of an offensive at the moment," he told a news conference. "The armed forces are good and ready. That does not mean we are expecting a war."

The military had no evidence the Tigers were planning a return to war either, he said, but should it come the armed forces were confident they could defeat the rebels on the battlefield.

"We are prepared," he said. "We have the superior position. There is no doubt about it."

Analysts say that although both the Tigers and new President Mahinda Rajapakse's government say they want new peace talks, the gulf between them is vast and that as tension rises war becomes an increasing possibility.

Rajapakse -- whose Buddhist and Marxist allies oppose any concessions to the rebels -- largely owes his November election win to a Tiger boycott that kept away Tamil voters seen likely to support his more conciliatory opponent. Some fear it is a sign the rebels have lost interest in the peace process.

Army chief Fonseka said that any conflict, if it came, would likely be a conventional war in the north -- where Tigers and government positions already face each other across a desolate no-man's land of bombed palm trees and landmined lagoons.

But in the east, where the Tigers hold only pockets of ground and are clashing with a breakaway group of rogue rebels who many believe the government may be backing or at least ignoring, conflict would be more "unconventional", he said.

Diplomats say they still believe war can be averted. Some Western envoys say clamping down on Tiger fundraising among Tamil communities in Europe, Australia and North America might help bring them to the table, but others warn it might push the rebels over the edge to war.