Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers accused the government yesterday of thrusting a war on them by using a rival rebel faction to weaken their forces and said they were ready to return to the battlefield.
The warning came less than a week after a suicide bomb blast blamed on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed five people at a police station in the capital, Colombo.
The LTTE says the military is aiding a rebel faction led by a breakaway eastern fighter known as Karuna, and is complicit in ongoing violence in his homebase of Batticaloa.
"This would make it plain to the Tamil people that the Sri Lankan state is not interested at all in taking forward the peace process but is only bent on using the talks and the cease-fire to wage a terrorist war on us," said E. Kausalyan, head of the Tigers' political wing in Batticaloa, on the Tamilnet Web site.
"We are ready to face the war that the Sri Lankan state has decided to thrust on us thus," he said.
But Kausalyan stopped short of saying the rebels would break the Norwegian-brokered truce that has held since 2002 and given the island its best chance to end the war that killed 64,000 over more than two decades.
Defense Secretary Cyril Herath said security forces were under strict instructions to stick to the cease-fire and denied they were involved with Karuna.
"Karuna's people can act on their own -- they don't need help," he said. "The instructions we have given to security forces is that they should in no way in word or deed do anything to perpetrate violence."
Nordic monitors overseeing the truce said they met the Tigers' political wing in the rebel-held north on Sunday, but it was a routine meeting not prompted by the surprise bombing.
"They have indicated they are still committed. They want to res-pect the cease-fire agreement," spokeswoman Disa Finnboga said.
Police said the target of the suicide blast was Tamil government minister Douglas Devananda, an outspoken critic of the Tigers.
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
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
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
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
RSS