SRI LANKA: Tamil rebel leader says peace 'impossible'
Updated
One person has been killed and three others injured after a female suicide bomber blew herself up outside the office of a government minister in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo. The violence comes a day after rebels leader Prabhakaran all but declared war on the government, saying peace was impossible and accusing the military of genocidal tendencies against the Tamils.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers: Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Asia Society in New York
CHAUDHURI: Well the peace process in any case has been more or less not working because the Sri Lankan army has been attacking the LTTE quite savagely over the past seven months, so therefore his response that he's prepared to go to war I think largely is right now designed to elicit some international response to put pressure on the Sri Lankans.
LAM: How do you read the Sri Lankan government's attitude towards the Tamil rebels, particularly the attitude of President Rajapakse?
CHAUDHURI: Well I think Rajapakse has concluded that he can actually win militarily and has said so, as much against the LTTE, which is one of the reasons he's been chipping away militarily. He's sunk most of the Tamil Tiger's navy, he's carried out aerial attacks, including killing the chief negotiator of the peace talks on the Tamil side, and so far contined basically pushing his military units further and further into the north. And that I think ultimately is one of the reasons why the Tamil Tigers are not responding at least rhetorically so strongly.
LAM: There were reports that Rajapakse had been advised by some of his analysts to negotiate from a position of strength. Do you think he should have followed that advice?
CHAUDHURI: Well I think that was the earlier analysis of the international community, both the governments of India and Western countries have warned him that he could not continue, and should not continue, to pursue a purely military solution to the civil war in Sri Lanka. And while Tamil Tigers are clearly militarily much weaker than they ever have been before, they are still quite capable of carrying out sufficient damage to the Sri Lankan government and to the economy. And one of the things that the LTTE has so far held back on has been their famous suicide terrorist attacks. They've held that back so far and the expectation is with this speech the Tamil Tigers are now considering resuming using that as a weapon against the Sinhalese.
LAM: And also one of the reasons given by Prabhakaran was a claim that the military has been targetting Tamil civilians. Is there any foundation to those claims?
CHAUDHURI: Well there has been almost a non-stop dirty war going on to some degree on both sides. But right now the initiative lies more with the Sinhalese. The Tamil Tigers have cited the recent deaths of a number of school children by a commando unit. I think the primary reason that he is citing this is more an attempt to get both the Tamil diaspora who are big funders of the LTTE and the international community to put more pressure on the Sinhalese government to stop it and to point out that any further military incursions by the Sri Lankan army will probably lead to high level civilian attacks, and also if he resumes suicide terrorism then there will be large-scale civilian casualties on both sides.
