Sri Lanka declares victory in war

The president declared victory Saturday in Sri Lanka’s quarter-century civil war with the Tamil Tigers rebels. But the group’s top leaders remained at large as troops and the insurgents fought fierce battles across the war zone.

A triumph on the battlefield appeared inevitable after government forces captured the last bit of coastline under rebel control early Saturday, surrounding the remaining Tamil fighters in a 1.2-square mile strip of land.

Thousands of civilians who had been caught in the fighting poured across the front lines, the military said.

“My government, with the total commitment of our armed forces, has in an unprecedented humanitarian operation finally defeated the LTTE militarily,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa said, referring to the rebels by their formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“I will be going back to a country that has been totally freed from the barbaric acts of the LTTE,” he said in a speech in Jordan that was distributed to the news media in Sri Lanka.

The rebels, who once controlled a de facto state across much of the north, have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for the Tamil minority, who complained of decades of marginalization by the Sinhalese majority.

The Tamil Tigers conducted hundreds of suicide attacks -- including the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi -- and have been branded terrorists by the United States, the European Union and India and shunned internationally.

The rebels also controlled a conventional army, with artillery units, a significant navy and even a tiny air force.

After repeated stalemates on the battlefield, the military broke through the rebel lines last year and forced the insurgents into a broad retreat, capturing their administrative capital at Kilinochchi in January and vowing to retake control of the rest of the country.

The rebels have insisted that if they are defeated in conventional battle, they will return to their guerrilla roots.

Troops swept in Saturday morning from the north and south, seizing control of the island’s entire coastline for the first time in decades, sealing the rebels in a tiny pocket of territory and cutting off the possibility of a sea escape by the rebels’ top leaders, the military said.

Government forces have been hunting for the reclusive rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and his top deputies for months, but it was unclear whether they remained in rebel territory or had already fled overseas.

Two senior fighters, known by their nicknames Sornam and Sasi Master, were killed in Saturday’s fighting, military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said. On Friday, the navy intercepted a boat off the northeastern coast Friday and arrested the fleeing wife, son and daughter of the rebels’ naval leader, known as Soosai, Nanayakkara said.

Even as Rajapaksa declared victory, Nanayakkara reported that fighting continued to rage in the northeast war zone. Huge explosions could be heard across the battlefield as rebels detonated their ammunition stocks and artillery dumps, Nanayakkara said.

Reports of the fighting are difficult to verify because the government has barred most journalists and aid workers from the conflict zone.

Almost 12,000 civilians escaped the war zone Saturday, joining more than 200,000 who fled in recent months and are being held in displacement camps, Nanayakkara said. Rights groups say the rebels were holding the civilians as human shields to blunt the government offensive. The rebels denied the accusation.