S.Lanka military says doesn’t expect war but ready

By Peter Apps

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s armed forces do not expect
the island’s shaky peace process to collapse into war but were
ready for battle and could defeat Tamil Tiger rebels if the
need arose, the country’s defense chiefs said on Friday.

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 cease-fire 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 cease-fire.
“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
organization labeled a Tiger front group by some has claimed
responsibility on the internet.

Chief of Defense 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 cease-fire 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.”

PREPARED, SUPERIOR FORCES

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.