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Sri Lanka Rebel Chief Pulls Back Fighters

By DILIP GANGULY
The Associated Press

KAJUWATTE, Sri Lanka - A renegade rebel commander has pulled back thousands of fighters to defend his base in eastern Sri Lanka after the main rebel faction attacked him with heavy mortar and gun fire, a military official and witnesses said Saturday.

Fighting on Friday between the Tamil Tiger rebel factions, which killed at least nine people and wounded 20, was the worst since a 2002 truce halted the country's 19-year civil war and threatened the fragile peace that has enveloped the nation.

Breakaway commander Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, also known as Karuna, recalled 2,000 of about 6,000 fighters to his Thoppigala base to set up defenses, a military official said on condition of anonymity.

Thoppigala is a jungle area in Batticaloa, 135 miles east of Colombo.

To reach Thoppigala, the main faction would have to cross through fortified government-held areas, thereby threatening Sri Lanka's fragile cease-fire, the official said.

The Norway-brokered cease-fire bars the rebels from entering government-held areas. Any attempt to carry weapons through government territory could provoke a military response, the official warned. The closest government territory is just six miles from Thoppigala, he added.

The Verugal River area - scene of Friday's fighting - was calm after the fighters pulled back and there were no signs of tensions Saturday, with people moving about and doing their usual work.

However, the military warned that both sides had planted Claymore mines - remotely detonated anti-personnel devices - on trees, bushes and bridges.

After hours of mortar and machine-gun fire Friday, about 500 fighters from the breakaway group - including women and teenage boys and girls - withdrew from the area, claiming they were repositioning, not retreating.

"About 1,000 ... people came and attacked us, so this is a tactical withdrawal and we are going to set up our new defense line," S. Kumar, a senior commander of the breakaway group, told The Associated Press.


"We will fight to the last," said Kumar, carrying a light machine gun.

The two sides had squared off at the river since Karuna announced the schism on March 3 in a dispute over regional rivalry and political strategy.

For two decades the Tamil Tigers fought government troops in a bloody separatist conflict which has claimed an estimated 65,000 lives.

Amid fears that the peace process could be doomed if government troops are drawn into the fighting, President Chandrika Kumaratunga ordered her commanders to help evacuate rebel casualties from both sides, but not to interfere in their conflict, an official in her office said.

"We don't want to get dragged into this," Defense Secretary Ciril Herath told The AP after an emergency meeting with European cease-fire-monitors in Colombo. "We are watching the situation very closely."

The army positioned men along the roadways in the region and along the sea cliff to prevent any landing by the mainstream Tigers at Panichachankani, where refugees were being cared for by the international relief organizations UNICEF and OXFAM.

On April 2, a political alliance led by Kumaratunga, who has taken a tough line on the rebels, won the most seats in parliamentary elections, defeating the party led by former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who initiated the most recent round of peace efforts.

Kumaratunga, blinded in one eye by a Tiger suicide bomber in 1999, had accused her rival of being too soft on the rebels.

Last Monday, the Tigers warned they would go back to war with the government if their demands for sweeping autonomy in Tamil-majority northeast Sri Lanka were not met. They say the minority Tamils face widespread discrimination from the ethnic Sinhalese majority.