Reuters AlertNet Lite - Sri Lanka battles rebels, evicts Tamils from capital

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Sri Lanka battles rebels, evicts Tamils from capital

07 Jun 2007 12:58:18 GMT
Source: Reuters

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Ethnic Tamil children play during a bath at a boarding house in the capital Colombo June 7, 2007. Sri Lanka evicted hundreds of ethnic Tamils from the capital on Thursday citing security concerns, as troops battled Tamil Tiger rebels in jungles in the island's restive east.
REUTERS/STR/SRI LANKA, STR

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(Updates with Tiger comment, parliament disrupted)

By Simon Gardner

COLOMBO, June 7 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka evicted hundreds of minority ethnic Tamils from the capital on Thursday and sent them back to the war-torn north citing security concerns, as the military battled Tamil Tiger rebels in the east.

Military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said the army killed five insurgents overnight in a jungle area called Thoppigala in the eastern district of Batticaloa.

He said fighting continued on Thursday, as Japan's special peace envoy visited camps for war-displaced families in the area.

"We are continuing with our operation in Thoppigala and neutralising their positions," Samarasinghe said. He said four soldiers were injured during Wednesday's clash, the latest in a series of land and sea battles.

Back in Colombo, police packed 376 Tamils deemed without valid reasons to be in the capital into buses, most of them headed towards the northern district of Vavuniya, the front line of the war.

"I came to Colombo 45 days ago to apply for a visa to go to Switzerland and was waiting for it," said a Tamil woman from the besieged army-held northern Jaffna peninsula.

"But police came today and told me to go to Vavuniya (in the north) and wait."

The woman, who asked not to be named, was staying at a modest boarding house. Her bags were packed and she was ready to leave.

Rohan Abeywardene, Inspector-General of Police for Colombo, said the ethnic Tamils were being sent back to their villages for their own safety. There have been a series of abductions blamed on state security services and Tamil Tiger rebels.

Police also want to stop insurgents infiltrating the capital.

"Some people who had no valid reasons to be in Colombo and are just hanging around, they have been requested to leave and told they had better get back to their own villages," he said. "It is for their own good. You all have been complaining about people being abducted and arrested and detained."

"There is also a possibility that LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) cadres are among them also," he added.

Officials said most of those evicted would cross over into Tamil Tiger-held territory and that the Tigers had agreed to let them cross defence lines.

The Tigers said they had not been contacted and condemned the eviction -- though have themselves been responsible for similar acts against minority Muslims in the past.

"Anybody denied a place in Sri Lanka, especially the minorities, are welcome to come to our areas," Tiger military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan said by telephone from the rebels' northern base of Kilinochchi.

ETHNIC CLEANSING?

Parliament was suspended for nearly two hours as Tamil and minority parties protested, while analysts decried the eviction as a shocking violation of human rights, with one likening it to a form of ethnic cleansing.

The move comes after a series of suspected Tamil Tiger bomb attacks in the capital in recent months as a conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983 deepens.

Japanese envoy Yasushi Akashi, who is on a 5-day visit to try to find ways to salvage a battered peace process, visited an elite police commando base and camps housing internally displaced people in Batticaloa on Thursday, an aide said.

The camps are far from the jungles where fighting is taking place.

Akashi was also due to visit the former rebel stronghold of Vakarai further north, which troops captured in January along with a vast swathe of eastern territory the rebels controlled under the terms of a tattered 2002 truce.

Japan has played down expectations of any breakthrough from the visit, but says the envoy will try to push forward an initiative to create a devolution proposal to end the conflict.

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Last updated:Thu Jun 7 13:00:29 2007