Sri Lanka's military and the island's Tamil Tiger rebels are locked in a low intensity war despite a ceasefire that still technically holds on paper, the head of the unarmed Nordic truce monitors said on Saturday. "You could in some definition say we already have a war. We don't have a peace agreement, we have a ceasefire agreement. So there is a war ongoing. It is a low intensity war. You can say that," Major General Ulf Henricsson, head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission, said in an interview.
Henricsson's comments came after the government bombed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) territory in the island's north on Thursday after the rebels attacked a navy flotilla and killed 17 sailors in the worst military clash since the 2002 ceasefire. Both the government and the Tigers say they remain committed to the ceasefire, but with more than 270 deaths estimated since early April. |