by Kath Noble 

As I stood at my bedroom window looking out at the red tracers and searchlights crisscrossing the sky on Friday night, I wondered how things had come to such a point.  The LTTE hasn’t been very popular amongst its own community for a long time.  After the suffering it has imposed on Tamils during all these years of fighting and the appalling number of Tamils it has felt compelled to kill for refusing to accept its leadership, the LTTE has been reduced to stealing children to despatch to the frontlines and even indoctrinate as suicide bombers. I wondered how an organisation with so little ready backing from ordinary people could have built those aeroplanes, and how it could have trained pilots to fly under the most trying of circumstances more than half the length of the country.

Situated about 20 minutes away from the main road in Welikanda, the Senapura centre is home to 74 former cadres who fought with the LTTE at various stages.  Ranging from 18 to 35 years in age, they are mainly from Batticaloa, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu, Kilinochchi and Jaffna, and the programme they are following spans one year or more. Funded by the Ministry of Justice, the primary function of the Senapura centre is to provide these young people with the skills needed to integrate in society and secure employment.

By Sandun A Jayasekera

Sri Lanka yesterday called on the International Community to pressure the LTTE to permit civilians to crossover to government controlled areas so that the security forces could end humanitarian operations soon.

Sri Lanka has rejected the LTTE's offer of a ceasefire to the war raging in north-east of the island nation. Its stand will doubtless be decried as counterproductive intransigence. Innocent Tamils are suffering and hence the calls for a political rather than military solution to the conflict. But those passing moral judgment on Sri Lanka's military offensive are off target. Aren't they overlooking the LTTE's caveat that it won't lay down arms? Or that its recent aborted air raid on Colombo signalled its complete lack of interest in peace? For the first time since 1983, the Tamil Tigers have been pushed into a fast-shrinking corner along the north-east coast. If they're now talking truce, there's reason to be suspicious. The LTTE has tactically capitulated before, only to live to fight another day. That's why the deal brokered by Norway in 2002 fell apart.