போர் முடிந்தது! end of the war !

உலகத்து முன்னணிச் செய்தி ஸ்தாபனங்கள் இலங்கை யுத்தம் முடிந்துவிட்டதாக அறிவிக்கின்றன.



( Reuters) (AFP) -
The Sri Lankan government on Monday declared an end to its decades-old conflict with the Tamil Tigers,

after routing the remnants of the rebel army and killing its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The army said its commandos overran the last sliver of Tiger territory, killing the last 300 fighters and decimating the rebel leadership. It said Prabhakaran and two deputies were shot dead trying to flee in a van and ambulance.
"We have successfully ended the war," the island's powerful defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse, told the president Monday in a nationally televised ceremony.
Army chief Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka also declared an end to all combat operations.
"Now the entire country is declared rid of terrorism," Fonseka said, adding the "dead bodies of terrorists are scattered over the last ditch."
The statements marked the end of one of Asia's oldest and most brutal ethnic conflicts which left more than 70,000 dead from pitched battles, suicide attacks, bomb strikes and assassinations.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged in the 1970s, with all-out war breaking out in the early 1980s as they pursued their struggle for an independent Tamil homeland on the Sinhalese-majority island.
Officials said all rebel leaders were killed in a final showdown on a lagoon and jungle peninsula on the northeast coast.
Prabhakaran and his two deputies had tried to flee advancing troops in an ambulance and another van but were ambushed by commandos, a senior defence ministry official told AFP.
"He was killed with two others inside the vehicle," the official said. The bodies were recovered and were undergoing DNA and forensic tests, defence sources said.
State television and the office of Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse confirmed the news.
The defence ministry said troops also killed Prabhakaran's deputies -- Sea Tiger leader Colonel Soosai and LTTE intelligence chief Pottu Amman.
Also killed were the rebel leader's 24-year-old son and potential heir Charles Anthony, the group's political wing leader B. Nadesan, and the head of the LTTE's defunct Peace Secretariat, S. Pulideevan.
The pro-rebel Tamilnet website said the LTTE leadership had told the Red Cross and United Nations they had stopped fighting and wanted to give themselves up, but that "initial reports indicate a determined massacre by the Sri Lanka Army."
In a dramatic announcement, the Tamil guerrillas had acknowledged Sunday that their battle for an independent ethnic homeland had reached its "bitter end."

The separatist rebels were once one of the world's most feared guerrilla armies, and ran a de facto mini-state spanning a third of the island before the government began a major offensive two years ago.


Rajapakse will open a new session of parliament Tuesday with an address that will officially mark the end of the war.
The capital Colombo, which has been frequently hit by Tiger suicide attacks over the past quarter century, saw street celebrations -- with residents setting off firecrackers and waving flags.
"This is a victory against terrorism. I am very proud of our forces, of what they have done," said Ashani de Silva, a Colombo student, as national flags were put up over shops, homes, offices and cars.
Victory euphoria also gripped Sri Lanka's stock exchange, with the main index jumping 6.45 percent.
Authorities had been determined to capture, kill or recover Prabhakaran's body amid fears his escape could have led to an attempt to rebuild the LTTE and usher in a new cycle of violence.
The Sri Lankan government's moment of triumph has also come at the cost of thousands of innocent lives lost in indiscriminate shelling, according to the United Nations. The UN's rights body now wants a war crimes probe.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral organisation that has been allowed to work in the war zone, has for its part described "an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe."
The European Union on Monday also called for an independent enquiry into alleged human rights violations, saying it was "appalled by the loss of innocent civilian lives as a result of the conflict and by the high numbers of casualties, including children."
The estimated 250,000 people displaced by the war are being moved into state-run "welfare villages" -- camps ringed by barbed wire and another source of international alarm.
Rights workers, aid groups and journalists are also being denied free access to the north.

The capital Colombo, which has been frequently hit by Tiger suicide attacks over the past quarter century, saw street celebrations -- with residents setting off firecrackers and waving flags.
"This is a victory against terrorism. I am very proud of our forces, of what they have done," said Ashani de Silva, a Colombo student, as national flags were put up over shops, homes, offices and cars.
Victory euphoria also gripped Sri Lanka's stock exchange, with the main index jumping 6.45 percent.
Authorities had been determined to capture, kill or recover Prabhakaran's body amid fears his escape could have led to an attempt to rebuild the LTTE and usher in a new cycle of violence.
The Sri Lankan government's moment of triumph has also come at the cost of thousands of innocent lives lost in indiscriminate shelling, according to the United Nations. The UN's rights body now wants a war crimes probe.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral organisation that has been allowed to work in the war zone, has for its part described "an unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe."
The European Union on Monday also called for an independent enquiry into alleged human rights violations, saying it was "appalled by the loss of innocent civilian lives as a result of the conflict and by the high numbers of casualties, including children."
The estimated 250,000 people displaced by the war are being moved into state-run "welfare villages" -- camps ringed by barbed wire and another source of international alarm.
Rights workers, aid groups and journalists are also being denied free access to the north.



COLOMBO (Reuters) -
Sri Lanka declared total victory on Monday in one of the world's most intractable wars, after killing the separatist Tamil Tigers' leader and taking control of the entire country for the first time since 1983.
In a climactic gunbattle, special forces troops killed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran as he tried to flee the war zone in an ambulance early on Monday, state television reported.
Prabhakaran, 54, founded the LTTE on a culture of suicide before surrender, and had sworn he would never be taken alive.
Army commander Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka said troops had crushed the last Tigers resisting an offensive that has in less than three years destroyed a group that had cultivated an aura of military invincibility while earning many terrorism designations.
"We have liberated the entire country by completely liberating the north from the terrorists. We have gained full control of LTTE-held areas," Fonseka announced on state TV.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa had already declared victory on Saturday, even as the final battle in Asia's longest modern war was intensifying after the last of 72,000 civilians held in the war zone had been freed.
The LTTE conceded defeat on Sunday. But it has long warned it would intensify guerrilla attacks on economically valuable targets if defeated on the battlefield, something which has hindered growth in Sri Lanka's tourism sector.
The end of combat and Prabhakaran's death sent the currency and stock markets to one-month and seven-month highs respectively.
COUNTING BODIES
The final act played out on a sandy patch of just 300 sq meters (3,230 sq ft) near the Indian Ocean island's northeastern coast, where the military said the last Tiger fighters had holed up in bunkers guarded by land mines and booby traps.
More than 250 Tigers corpses were recovered, and Fonseka said checks were underway to see if Prabhakaran's was among them.
Already, the body of his son and heir-apparent, Charles Anthony, and two top lieutenants, intelligence chief Pottu Amman and naval wing leader Soosai, had been identified.
State TV showed several bodies, including that of Charles Anthony.
The LTTE had no immediate comment. Independent confirmation of battlefield accounts are all but impossible, since the war zone has been sealed off to most outsiders.
Officially, the military has not confirmed Prabhakaran's death. Rajapaksa is expected to do so on Tuesday in a speech to be broadcast nationally from parliament.
India, which originally armed the LTTE but later fought it during a disastrous 1987-1990 peacekeeping mission, urged Rajapaksa to devolve political power to ethnic Tamils.
"It is our view that as the conventional conflict in Sri Lanka comes to an end, this is the moment when the root causes of conflict in Sri Lanka can be addressed," a foreign ministry statement said.
Rajapaksa has pledged to call elections in the former LTTE areas as swiftly as possible.
The two sides had refused to negotiate an end to the war, despite Western calls to protect what the United Nations said were 50,000-100,000 people held by the LTTE as human shields.
The military has long viewed killing Prabhakaran as essential to stopping the LTTE from regenerating, since he has maintained total control over it since founding it in 1976.
He singlehandedly turned the LTTE into one of the best-armed irregular forces, which carried out hundreds of assassinations and suicide bombings, and maintained an army, naval wing and a even a combat air wing of light planes.
EU CALLS FOR PROBE
Sri Lanka's triumph was not without controversy. The European Union on Monday urged an independent inquiry into alleged human rights violations, mainly over reported civilian deaths.
Sri Lanka accuses the West of double standards when it comes to civilian deaths, and points to U.S. air strikes that have killed innocent people in Afghanistan and Pakistan as an example.
In Colombo, demonstrators threw rocks at the British High Commission, tossed a burning effigy of Foreign Secretary David Miliband inside and spray-painted its heavily fortified wall with epithets and a message: "LTTE headquarters."
Miliband has been critical of the government's prosecution of the war, and is seen here as sympathetic to the vocal pro-LTTE lobby that has protested outside Britain's parliament for weeks.
Sri Lanka has been furious that LTTE supporters have been allowed to vandalize several of its embassies in Western capitals as part of a series of protests against the war.
In the Tamil-majority Indian state of Tamil Nadu, security forces were on high alert in case Tiger sympathizers reacted violently to news of Prabhakaran's death, police said.
Tamils complain of marginalization at the hands of successive governments led by the Sinhalese majority, which came to power at independence in 1948 and took the favored position the Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government.
The LTTE at the height of its power had ruled a de facto state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority that it called Tamil Eelam, where it collected taxes and had its own courts and police.
But the very government the LTTE fought against provided essential services like health care, education and electricity.




Conflict in Sri Lanka


As the ongoing conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam narrows to a smaller stretch of land, hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children, remain at great risk in the conflict zone.

In the past week, more than 40,000 people have fled their homes in the north. Civilians fleeing the conflict area are seeking safety in temporary displacement camps where the need for medicines, food, water and shelter is rapidly growing.

“We know from those who have fled earlier, that these new waves of internally displaced survivors will be in great need, having been caught in the middle of a war zone for weeks. There is great need for medicines, food and shelter,” says Suresh Bartlett, World Vision Lanka’s National Director.

Sponsored Children Unaffected
Canadians sponsor 17,500 children in Sri Lanka through World Vision. These children live in communities in the southeast and southwest of the country and are not directly affected by the conflict in the north.

However, this conflict is having a profound impact on the lives of children in the area, with an estimated 300,000 children affected by the war.

World Vision in the Camps
Prior to the exodus on April 20, more than 65,000 people were accommodated in camps in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna, Mannar and Vavuniya districts. The majority of these are housed in 16 camps in the Vavuniya district and World Vision is currently working in all these sites.

In recent weeks, food packets have been provided to more than 25,000 internally displaced people (IDPs), and preparations are underway to address the needs of some 60,000 IDPs. On a daily basis, nearly 70,000 litres of water are being distributed across various camp locations where those who have already been displaced are being cared for. Medical-care packs have been distributed to 700 families.

World Vision is also working to set up shelter and Child Friendly Spaces with activities for hundreds of children affected by the conflict. Breastfeeding tents have now been set up in every campsite across Vavuniya district.

World Vision Calls for Humanitarian Assistance
World Vision continues to call on all parties to the conflict to exercise restraint and give priority to the protection and care of all civilians. The organization calls on Canada to provide increased humanitarian assistance to affected children and communities.

World Vision also advocates that Canada support the government of Sri Lanka in taking immediate steps to outline a durable peace process and plan that addresses the root causes of the conflict.

How You Can Help
World Vision is currently raising funds with the goal of helping 60,000 children and their family members who have been affected by fighting in Sri Lanka.