Tamils drop demand for separate homeland

Many believe the 25-year civil war is now over. TNA's decision to refocus shows Tamil Tigers accept the end of the war, say analysts.

Sri Lanka's principal ethnic Tamil political party (the Tamil National Alliance or TNA), founded in 2001 as a proxy for militants fighting for an independent Tamil home-land (Eelam), has abandoned its demand for a separate state in favor of regional autonomy.

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The TNA said it would accept a "federal structure" for the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. Though widely anticipated, the move is of great symbolic significance, and reinforces the sense that the 25-year civil war that killed between 80,000 and 100,000 is definitively over. More>>

Sri Lankan Tamils try to rise again

Sri Lankan Tamil expats protesting in support of the LTTE in Canada before defeat.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels are trying to rise from the ashes of their devastating battlefield defeat, swearing off violence and pledging to transform their internationally shunned terror group into a democratic movement for Tamil statehood.

Their rebranding effort faces long odds. The Tamil Tigers' self-proclaimed new leader is a wanted arms smuggler, the group has no presence inside Sri Lanka, and the government has brushed off the remaining rebels as irrelevant. It's not even clear if anyone is really in charge of the tattered and demoralized group.

"There is no LTTE now, because we have totally destroyed their capabilities and their hierarchy," Media Minister Anura Yapa said, referring to the rebels by an acronym of their formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The rebels once controlled a shadow state across northern Sri Lanka backed by thousands of guerrilla fighters, a navy, and even a nascent air force. They were finally crushed by government forces last month after a quarter century of civil war and terrorist tactics.

In the final days of the battle, the military killed much of the Tamil Tigers' leadership, including Velupillai Prabhakaran, the unquestioned ruler of the group. His dispatch of hundreds of suicide attackers — whose victims ranged from former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to commuters in a train station — landed the group on terror lists around the world.

Now, nearly 300,000 ethnic Tamil civilians from the rebels' former stronghold are being held in displacement camps in the north as security forces sweep through the rest of the country searching for remaining sleeper cells.

But the rebels also maintained a vast international support network among the estimated 800,000 Tamil expatriates living in Canada, Australia, Britain and other countries. More>>

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Explosion in Sri Lankan capital wounds at least 44

Bharatha Mallawarachi (AP)

Sri Lankan soldiers patrol the 'de facto' frontline at Nager Kovil in the Jaffna Peninsula. Sri Lankan troops killed 10 Tamil Tiger rebels during fresh clashes in the north as the military inches its way towards the guerrillas' political capital (AFP/File/Lakruwan Wanniarachchi).

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- The Sri Lankan military says an explosion has rocked the capital, Colombo. A military official says details on casualties were not immediately available after Saturday's blast. Pushpa Soyza, a spokeswoman for a Colombo hospital, says 44 wounded people are receiving treatment there. The military official spoke on condition of anonymity citing government policy. Sri Lanka is immersed in a decades-long civil war with Hindu-separatists in which more than 70,000 people have been killed. The Tamil Tiger rebels (LTTE) have been fighting for an independent state in the north and east since 1983.

Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu devotees take part in an annual cart festival by inserting hooks through their skin at Mayura temple in Colombo August 8, 2008. The act of inserting the hooks is one of the ways devotees fulfil their vows to Hindu gods (Reuters/Buddhika Weerasinghe).

A bomb destroyed bus in Kandy. Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts (AFP/File).