Sri Lankan rebels admit defeat

Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, the once formidable insurgency that pioneered guerrilla suicide attacks, claimed Sunday they had given up their 25-year battle for an ethnic homeland on the tropical island nation.

Surrounded in a small coconut grove with Sri Lankan forces closing in, several leaders reportedly committed suicide instead of surrendering.

The reports, if accurate, would mark the end of a rebel movement that once controlled nearly one-fifth of the island and oversaw a civil administration, navy and air force bankrolled by up to $300 million a year from smuggling and from donations by expatriate Tamils all over the world.

“We have decided to silence our guns. Our only regrets are for the lives lost and that we could not hold out for longer,” Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the Tigers’ head of international relations, said in a statement posted on a pro-Tamil Web site.

The announcement could end the quarter-century conflict that has killed more than 70,000 people. The war climaxed with a bloody government offensive into the Tigers’ last outpost, a tiny strip of land on the country’s northeastern coast.

Critics say the death toll has swelled in recent months from government shelling of Tamil civilians trapped in a shrinking war zone. The rebels are accused of using people as human shields and of killing civilians who attempt to flee.

Government forces pressed ahead with “mopping-up operations” Sunday to clear pockets of resistance, with some holdouts carrying out suicide attacks as troops advanced on rebel-held territory of less than a half square mile, said military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara.

The fate of rebel chief Prabhakaran is still in question. Some reports said the military had recovered a body thought to be his and is awaiting confirmation.

The elusive leader had vowed never to surrender and carries a cyanide capsule around his neck to commit suicide to avoid being taken alive.

Mahinda Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka’s human rights minister, said that 63,000 people had escaped the war zone in the past three days and were now being “looked after by the government.” The latest estimate raises the total number of civilians who fled the area since January to nearly 250,000.

The Tigers’ Mr. Pathmanathan countered that the bodies of 3,000 people lay scattered on the ground, in addition to the 25,000 more who are wounded.

Neither side’s claims could be independently verified since the government has barred most journalists and aid workers from entering the war zone.

Sri Lankan government officials had repeatedly said the war was already over before the Tigers’ announcement Sunday. After a string of battlefield successes, the end had seemed inevitable for weeks.

On Saturday, government forces reclaimed the island’s entire coastline for the first time since fighting broke out, effectively cutting off any escape by sea for the rebels. The military said some had tried to sneak away over the weekend on boats, disguised as civilians, only to be stopped by government troops.

The Tamil Tigers, formally known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, began as a guerrilla movement in 1983 to fight for a separate homeland on behalf of an ethnic-Tamil minority marginalized by the Sinhalese majority.

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