India to Begin Withdrawing Its Troops From Sri Lanka Today

India and Sri Lanka on Friday defused a potentially bloody crisis in an 11th-hour agreement to begin withdrawing 45,000 Indian army troops from the island today, the deadline Sri Lanka had set for all troops to leave its war-torn northern regions.

The two countries, separated by just 21 miles of water off India’s southern tip, also agreed to begin discussions in New Delhi today on a timetable for a complete troop pullout.

As the two governments were involved in intensive negotiations to resolve the conflict, rioting broke out in the central city of Kandy. About 130 demonstrators were killed when police opened fire during anti-Indian rallies that took place despite a strict nationwide curfew, military officials said today.

No violence was reported in the capital city of Colombo, which has resembled a ghost town since the curfew went into effect at midnight Thursday.

Many other civilians reportedly were killed elsewhere in the countryside, where the Sinhalese insurgent movement, the People’s Liberation Front, is growing in strength, in part by encouraging nationalist hatred for the Indian “peacekeeping force.”

In a speech to his nation of 16 million Friday night, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa called India’s pledge “an exemplary action,” and Aftab Seth, a Foreign Ministry spokesman in New Delhi, hailed the agreement as “the victory of reason.”

However, the accord stopped far short of Premadasa’s demand last month that India remove by today all troops it sent to Sri Lanka two years ago in an ill-fated effort to put down an uprising by Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil community.

India, which helped train and arm the Tamils in the early 1980s, had been asked to dispatch the troops by Premadasa’s predecessor.

Premadasa, a professed nationalist whose popularity has waned since his election last year, stunned India on June 1 with his unilateral withdrawal demand, which was publicly rejected by Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

But the Sri Lankan president also indicated he is aware that the diplomatic tussle with India, a nation with an army 50 times larger than his, is hardly his major problem.

During his speech Friday night, Premadasa called on his nation to launch “a massive peace effort” to quell a second and far more threatening counterinsurgency by the island’s Sinhalese ethnic majority.

“By resorting to strikes and various destructive activities . . . we are causing damage and great harm to ourselves,” Premadasa said. About 40 people are killed each day in the conflict on this once-idyllic island, where the economy now is crippled.

Despite the appeal, independent analysts and diplomats said Premadasa’s seven-month-old government clearly showed signs Friday of increasing desperation.

In signing the agreement, Premadasa backed down from almost all his original demands of India. And, to keep peace on the streets Friday, he was forced to impose a strict, 54-hour curfew on the entire country.

“Premadasa may have saved a bit of face in signing this agreement today,” said one Western diplomat who asked not to be named. “But, for him, the real crisis is still right in his own backyard. Now that he’s settled with the Indians, he must face his own people. And that’s a problem that won’t go away so easily.”