Sri Lanka Rebels Offer Talks With Regime on Ending War

Tamil rebels offered Saturday to hold talks with the Sri Lankan government on ending their war for independence.

The offer was made public hours after a jungle ambush blamed on the rebels left 21 soldiers dead. It was the third attack blamed on the rebels in as many days. At least 79 people have died in the violence.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the largest and most powerful Tamil rebel group, sent a letter to President Ranasinghe Premadasa offering to hold talks, a spokesman for the organization said. Copies of the letter, signed by the group’s political committee, were sent to newspapers.

The offer was an apparent response to Premadasa’s recent call for a cease-fire. A spokesman for the president called the Tamil statement a “major breakthrough.”

The last talks between the Tigers and the government were held in 1985 in Thimpu, Bhutan. The negotiations ended in failure.

A leader of the Tamil Tigers said in Colombo that he would meet with Premadasa to discuss arrangements for the talks.

Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, account for 18% of Sri Lanka’s 16 million people. They complain that they are discriminated against in jobs and education by the majority Sinhalese, who are mostly Buddhists and who make up 75% of the population. Most of the rest are Muslims.

Saturday’s jungle ambush occurred near Parakramapura, a village about 150 miles northeast of Colombo, where soldiers were guarding Sinhalese laborers clearing the forest, military officials in Colombo said.

At least 21 soldiers were killed and four laborers were critically injured in the fighting, the officials said.

On Friday, at least 12 people were killed and 18 others injured in the Tamil-dominated town of Jaffna, 180 miles north of Colombo, when a car bomb exploded near the town’s university. Military officials in Colombo said the bomb was intended for soldiers in a small camp nearby and exploded prematurely.

On Thursday, a car bomb in the port city of Trincomalee killed 45 people, mostly members of the Sinhalese ethnic majority.

That explosion came a day after security forces began a weeklong unilateral cease-fire in an effort to persuade both rebels of the Tamil minority and militant members of the Sinhalese majority to stop fighting.

Both groups of radicals rejected the cease-fire proposal.