End game

'Welcome To Kilinochchi,' Former Tiger Stronghold

Stewart Bell, National Post 

The National Post's Stewart Bell was the first Canadian reporter to reach Kilinochchi, once the rebel stronghold of Sri Lanka, since the fall of the Tamil Tigers. This is his report from the front lines of the Tigers' last redoubt.

The road across the salt water lagoon to Putumathalan was lined with soldiers preparing to end a civil war that began so long ago that most of them weren't even born.

Two weeks ago, this sandy quay on the Indian Ocean was in the hands of the Tamil Tigers, but the rebels lost it in a matter of hours, leaving a trail of bullet casings, shot-up vehicles and fallen cadres.

The front line is now a few kilometres southeast of here. Behind it, what's left of the rebel forces, and thousands of Tamil civilians, are surrounded in an oceanfront enclave no larger than a few city blocks.

Exactly what goes on inside the shrinking rebel territory is impossible to verify. Occasionally over the weekend, explosions were audible and a plume of smoke blackened the sky, but there was no indication of the cause or which side was responsible.

Asked about the booms, a general said they could have been hand grenades or troops detonating land mines. He insisted his troops were no longer using heavy weapons because of the risk to civilians.

Later, a pro-rebel Web site alleged Sri Lankan forces had shelled a hospital, killing at least 64 patients and injuring 87. The government denied it. Even this close to the fighting, there was no way to know who was telling the truth.

What was apparent from a military-escorted tour this weekend was that the rebels are in serious peril -- and their dream of independence for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority is in serious doubt. The Wanni region that was until recently Tiger country was a wasteland, emptied of not only rebels but of virtually its entire population.

The voyage to the front began in a Russian Antonov-2 military transport plane that brought reporters to Anuradhapura air base. From there, a Russian MI-17 helicopter skimmed low over the jungle, scattering the cows and peacocks below, until it set down in a field.

"Welcome to Kilinochchi," a beaming officer said.

Once the rebel capital , Kilinochchi was captured by the Sri Lankan forces in January and is now a garrison town. Some of the buildings have been flattened, while others have been taken over by soldiers.

In a briefing room papered with large maps, Lieutenant-General Jagath Dais, the commander of 57 Divison, said his troops had set out less than two years ago to bring about the "total defeat" of the Tamil Tigers.

One of the slides he projected on a screen said the tactics used by the rebels included harnessing Tamils living abroad to "influence local politicians, diplomats and foreign governments to apply pressure in order to stop the military offensives."

He explained how his forces had advanced up Sri Lanka's western region before turning east. Along the way, they had killed more than 5,000 rebels and captured vast stockpiles of arms and ammunition, he said.

For every 11 rebels killed, the general said he had lost just one of his own soldiers. Asked how many civilians had died during the offensive, the general was adamant. "No civilian casualties," he replied. "Zero."

But the leader of the Tamil National Alliance party, Rajavarothayam Sampanthan, accused the military of concealing the true number of civilian casualties by refusing to allow humanitarian workers and media into the conflict zone, except on what he called chartered tours. "Our estimate is that over 6,000 civilians have been killed," he said in an interview.

Canada's Minister of International Cooperation, Bev Oda, was scheduled to arrive in Colombo today to assess the country's humanitarian needs. Canada has joined international calls for a ceasefire and the rebels asked Britain and France to negotiate a truce but Sri Lanka says it intends to finish off the Tigers.

In Kilinochchi, reporters boarded armoured vehicles, which jostled down the A-35 road toward the front. The road passed through dozens of villages, all of them empty except for the soldiers.

This route used to link the heart of rebel territory. The guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran lived just off the road in a compound with an underground bunker. But over the past four months, the road has been the path of retreat for the rebels and the civilian population.

The roadside is littered with the remnants of the retreat -- spent ammunition, a wheelchair, a bicycle, the frames of wrecked buildings, abandoned shops, fallen tree limbs, chairs, a truck resting on its side, goats and dogs scavenging through the war debris for scraps. Eerily, there are no people.

At Puthukudirippu, the armoured vehicle, weaving to dodge oil drums in the road and shaking like it might come apart, turned northeast toward the coast and stopped in a red dust cloud.

Passenger buses were lined up, ready to transport those fleeing the fighting to camps around the central city of Vavuniya, where those displaced by the war are being held until they can return to their homes.

Beside the buses, three shelters for processing the IDPs, or internally displaced persons, as they are called, provided the only shade. Two water trucks were parked nearby. A lengthy stretch of razor wire, apparently a makeshift queue for new arrivals, stretched down to the lagoon.

During the past two weeks, more than 100,000 people have waded across the lagoon to this desolate campground, but this weekend it was empty. There had been no arrivals since Thursday.

Down the road, past a cemetery, troops were assembled near Putumathalan, draped in rocket-propelled grenades and ammunition belts. A defensive wall of earth built by the rebels followed the shoreline.

Brigadier General Shavendra Silva arrived and spoke to reporters. The general commands the army's 58 Division, which controls this area. He said his mission in this campaign was to kill as many Tamil Tigers as possible, reasoning that it was the best way to regain territory from the rebels.

His troops began fighting on Sri Lanka's western coast in the fall of 2007.

There was heavy resistance at first, he said. It took almost nine months to advance the first six kilometres, but in the process they killed almost 2,000 rebels and after that were able to quickly move north, he said. They captured the entire west coast and moved east until arriving at this isthmus for what could be the final showdown.

He said the civilians remaining with the rebels would be brought out "in a couple of days." As for the rebels, he vowed to "kill each and every LTTE-er," using the acronym for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. "If we can finish this off, we will be the happiest," he said.

His orders, he said, were that there should be no civilian casualties. He said they came straight from the Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. "We will be only trying to use only the small arms, until the civilians have been taken out," he said.

Asked whether he was confident the insurgency would be brought to an end without harming civilians, Lieut.-Gen. Dais replied: "Piece of cake." But a few hours later, in a nearby village called Kaiveli, an army ambulance pulled up outside a small health clinic and medics carried off a stretcher holding a wounded soldier.

They put him down in the shade outside the Primary Health Care Centre, a decrepit two-room building off a road lined with tank shell casings and empty ammunition crates. Flies swarmed over the dried blood that stained the floor.

The only medical equipment inside was a metal operating table. There was no doctor in sight. A pair of mattresses made of weathered foam lay side by side under a shelter outside, amid syringes, IV bottles, shell casings and blood-soaked stretchers.

The wounded soldier had bandages on his leg and head. He appeared unconscious.

He had apparently been injured by a rebel land mine and brought to this clinic, which a soldier said was used for army casualties.

The sign painted beside the front door in blue lettering said it had been "funded by donor: CIDA," the acronym for the Canadian International Development Agency.