Lankan president declares Tamil Tigers 'defeated'

COLOMBO (Reuters/AFP) - The president of Sri Lanka declared Saturday that the island’s separatist Tamil Tiger rebels have been “defeated militarily” after decades of bitter ethnic bloodshed.
Defence officials said the massive offensive against the rebel army was all but complete, with the entire island under government control for the first time in years but for a miniscule pocket of jungle.
They said the remnants of the once formidable rebel force “were preparing for a mass suicide after being effectively cut-off of escape routes, both land and sea” by a morning coastal pincer movement by the army.
Meanwhile, Intelligence reports indicated that Vellupillai Prabhakaran, founder-leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and other leaders were surrounded by soldiers in barely a square km (half a sq mile) of land near the northeastern coast.
The Defence Ministry said the last rebels might be planning a mass suicide attack. Rajapaksa told a meeting of 11 developing countries that his troops had “finally defeated the LTTE militarily”, a government statement said.But a presidential official who declined to be named said this was not an official declaration of victory. Rajapaksa was due to give an address on national television after his return.
The closure of the coast means the Tigers no longer have an escape route to the Indian Ocean. But the United Nations and others say they are still holding tens of thousands of civilians as human shields.
Nearly 11,900 people fled rebel areas on Saturday, bringing the total to more than 25,000 since Thursday, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.
The LTTE said a conventional defeat would only result in a new conflict of a different kind.
“Colombo’s approach, to finish the war in 48 hours through a carnage and bloodbath of civilians, will never resolve a conflict of decades,” the pro-rebel website www.TamilNet.com quoted the LTTE’s S. Pathmanathan as saying.
“On the contrary, it will only escalate the crisis to unforeseen heights.”
Pathmanathan, believed by diplomats to be somewhere in southeast Asia, has for years been the Tigers’ chief weapons procurer, and is wanted by Interpol.
The Tigers have answered early battlefield losses with suicide bombings in the capital, Colombo. Their widespread use of assassinations and suicide blasts has prompted the United States, European Union and India to class them as terrorists.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, was due in Colombo to make a last-ditch attempt for a negotiated end to the war.