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2006-06-19 Sri Lanka

11 Naval sailors, 30 Tamil rebels killed

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Posted by Fred 2006-06-19 00:00|| || Front Page|| [5 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 Old Rock of Ages, we've got ourselves another war. A gut bustin', mother-lovin' Navy war.

Posted by Paul Eddington 2006-06-19 00:44|| 2006-06-19 00:44|| Front Page Top

#2 Source: http://reference.allrefer.com/country-guide-study/sri-lanka/sri-lanka166.html

he Sri Lankan Navy, originally established in December 1950 as the Royal Ceylon Navy, is the smallest of the nation's armed services. It consists of a regular and a volunteer force, each with its own reserve component. The navy is under the direct operational control of a service commander who is equal in authority to the army and air force commanders. The force is divided into three Naval Area Commands--Northern, Eastern, and Western--with a fourth (Southern Command) to be established at a later date. The navy maintains major bases in Colombo and Trincomalee, with secondary bases at Karainagar (Jaffna District), Welisara (Colombo District), Tangalla (Hambantota District), and Kalpitiya (Puttalam District).

The navy's primary mission is to prevent illegal immigration and smuggling across the Palk Strait, the narrow body of water that separates the island from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. With the growth of the Tamil separatist movement in the late 1970s, the strait became a major conduit for armaments and insurgents traveling from training bases in south India, and the naval mission was therefore expanded to include counterinsurgency patrols.

In the late 1980s, the navy had an approximate total strength of 4,000, including active reservists. By 1985 estimates, the regular force contained 243 officers and 3,072 ratings, and the Volunteer Naval Force had 64 officers and 427 men, a substantial increase over the 1977 figures (200 officers, 2,400 ratings).

In late 1987, the navy had a fleet of approximately seventy vessels, more than half of them coastal patrol craft. Building on an original fleet of mostly British ships, the government took aggressive steps to expand its sources of supply and at the same time develop a domestic shipbuilding industry sufficient to meet national defense needs. As a result, the Colombo dockyards began production of the 40-ton Pradeepa coastal patrol craft in 1980, followed by the 330-ton Jayasagara large patrol craft. The original fleet of six Sooraya fast attack craft (the Chinese Shanghai-II, bought in 1972 and 1975) was supplemented in 1985 with six Israeli Super Dvora craft, and eight more were reportedly on order. One serious gap in the fleet was the lack of shallow-draft vessels suitable for surveying purposes. Palk Strait, although relatively narrow, is infamously difficult to navigate because of the large number of uncharted coral reefs.

Posted by FOTSGreg">FOTSGreg 2006-06-19 01:08|| www.fire-on-the-suns.com]">[www.fire-on-the-suns.com] 2006-06-19 01:08|| Front Page Top

#3 Pro-Chinese andor Chicom mil bloggers are calling for China to send armed peacekeeping, trade, and other advisory forces to the former Ceylon.

Posted by JosephMendiola 2006-06-19 01:53|| 2006-06-19 01:53|| Front Page Top

#4 China? What justification have they to get involved?

Posted by trailing wife 2006-06-19 07:32|| 2006-06-19 07:32|| Front Page Top

#5 I think the Indian Navy, and the maritime strike aircraft of the Indian Air Force would have something to say about that.

Posted by john 2006-06-19 08:40|| 2006-06-19 08:40|| Front Page Top

#6 The year was 1971. Late one evening, an Indian naval ship apparently radioed Colombo harbour. "Am having engine trouble. Request permission to put in at the harbour." The port authorities readily agreed.

Immediately another message came in: "Have sister ship with me as well. Request permission for that too to put in." The port authorities, once again, agreed. After all, they had no reason not to.

The next evening, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike was at a cinema show when she got an SOS from her security people: extremist uprisings had suddenly broken out all over the island. The Sri Lankan Army was called out, but with little effect. The armed revolution -- reportedly an extreme-Left, Trotskyite initiative aided and abetted by North Korea -- soon began to get out of control.

The armed forces admitted they couldn't handle the situation. The Sri Lankan government started to panic. Mrs Bandaranaike finally got on the phone and called up her good friend Mrs Gandhi in Delhi, requesting her to send military assistance.

Back came the reply from Delhi: "By a strange coincidence, there happen to be two shiploads of Gurkhas sitting in Colombo harbour right now. They are at your disposal to put down the disturbances."

Posted by john 2006-06-19 08:56|| 2006-06-19 08:56|| Front Page Top

#7 Battle of the Sulu Strait?

Posted by Chuck Simmins">Chuck Simmins 2006-06-19 10:20|| http://northshorejournal.org]">[http://northshorejournal.org] 2006-06-19 10:20|| Front Page Top

#8 The forgotten uprising by Anvar Alikhan

The Gurkhas swiftly went into action. The uprising -- which was centred mainly in the hills of central Sri Lanka -- was put down with brutal efficiency. Official figures are either very hazy or non-existent, but people will tell you that literally thousands of Sinhalese youth were killed in the process.

A friend of mine, who claims to have had a very narrow escape himself, told me that any and every bearded Sinhalese male aged between 18 and 25 was suspect -- the beard apparently being a distinguishing feature of the Trotskyite movement. They were either summarily shot or jailed or, at the very least, rounded up and harshly interrogated.

My friend (an entirely innocent, but bearded, Sinhalese, 20 years old and on holiday in the hills) was just the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now a computer graphics guru in the US, he still shudders at the memory of how narrow a shave he had at the hands of the Indian Army, no pun intended.

Apparently the Trotskyites came fairly close to pulling off their coup, but it was just a combination of timing, luck and good, old-fashioned ruthlessness on the part of the Indian Army that saved the day for Mrs Bandaranaike's government. She was deeply indebted to Mrs Gandhi for her help after that.

Posted by john 2006-06-19 12:09|| 2006-06-19 12:09|| Front Page Top

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