Norwegian-led peace monitors met with Tamil Tiger rebel leaders yesterday to discuss a "dangerous" split among the guerrillas, officials said.
The meeting in the rebel-held northern town of Kilinochchi came a day after a senior rebel said more than a third of the Tigers, or about 6,000 guerrillas, in eastern Sri Lanka had split off from the main insurgent army because of disputes over the deployment of fighters.
"I can confirm that the meeting has started," said Agnes Bragadottir, spokeswoman of the Norwegian-led Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. She declined to give details. Kilinochchi is 275km north of Colombo.
Word of the rift, a month ahead of nationwide elections, is a blow to the rebels, who until now have been largely united in their 19-year war for a separate homeland. Although the split is unlikely to set off factional fighting, dissension among rebel ranks is seldom tolerated.
The guerrillas tried to present a united front yesterday. An unidentified spokesman for Karuna, the head of the eastern faction, denied there was a schism and pledged allegiance to the Tiger "leader," an apparent reference to top guerrilla leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran.
"We will be functioning directly under the command of our leader," the Karuna spokesman was quoted as saying by the TamilNet Web site, which reports on rebel affairs.
But a senior official from Karuna's office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that Karuna was heading a new faction after arguing with Prabhakaran over sending new recruits from the east to the north.
The official said Karuna felt that rebel leaders in the north had taken young fighters as well as other resources from the east, but not given anything back.
Prabhakaran will now command an estimated 9,000 troops, he added.
The official said the split would not lead to fighting between the rebel factions.
However, some rebels who have tried to leave the group in the past have been killed.
The split is likely to hamper efforts by Norwegian negotiators to secure a peace deal between the rebels and the government. Hagrup Haukland, deputy head of the peace monitoring team, described it as a "dangerous situation."
"We need to look closely at what's happening," Haukland said ahead of the trip.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS