"We tried very hard -- we insisted and we insisted....!!!

Britain, France fail to secure Sri Lanka truce


COLOMBO (AFP) — The foreign ministers of Britain and France said Wednesday they had failed to persuade Sri Lanka to end its offensive against Tamil rebels and allow aid in for civilians trapped by the fighting.

"We tried very hard -- we insisted and we insisted -- but it is up to our friends to allow it or not," French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told a news conference after talks with the Sri Lankan government.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband also said the talks had ended without a breakthrough.

"Now is the time for the fighting to stop," Miliband said, but later admitted to the BBC that "there isn't going to be a ceasefire today as a result of this visit."

"This does belong on the United Nations Security Council agenda," he warned. "This is a civil war that does have regional and wider ramifications, and happens to be a massive civilian emergency as well."

Sri Lanka's leaders say they are on the cusp of victory after 37 years of violence, with the ethnic rebels cornered and outnumbered in a small strip of coastal jungle in the northeast of the island.

President Mahinda Rajapakse told the two ministers that access to the conflict area was not possible because of the on-going fighting, a government spokesman said.

"The main point raised by the two ministers was access to the area where fighting is going on and the president very clearly and politely said 'no need'," the spokesman said after closed-door talks.

The refusal means the two ministers will leave Sri Lanka after a one-day visit empty handed, after being unable to secure agreement on a ceasefire.

Government officials have argued that any truce would only allow the rebels to regroup.

But at the centre of global concern are some 50,000 Tamil civilians who the United Nations says are unable to escape the fighting.

"There's no question that there has been abuse of civilians by the Tamil Tigers, preventing people leaving the conflict zone, and obviously we're very concerned about the heavy pounding that has been going on in the conflict zone as well," Miliband said.

A UN document circulated among diplomats in Colombo last week said that as many as 6,500 civilians may have been killed and another 14,000 wounded in the government's offensive so far this year.

Sri Lanka has for months blocked most aid agencies from working in the conflict zone, and has herded about 110,000 fleeing civilians into overcrowded camps which are guarded by the military.

Kouchner and Miliband visited one camp near the northern town of Vavuniya on Wednesday, where Tamils told them of relatives who had been arrested inside what the government calls "welfare villages."

Kouchner told AFP that "this camp is good, the rest must be awful," referring to the severe shortage of food, shelter and medical essentials reported at other camps.

Although Sri Lanka is restricting access for aid agencies, it did appeal for 100 million dollars in foreign aid for the nearly 200,000 civilians displaced by the offensive, Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe told AFP.

On the eve of the ministers' one-day visit, Sri Lankan authorities denied a visa to Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who was hoping to join the peace mission -- prompting a major diplomatic row with the European Union.

The diplomatic row was a symptom of Sri Lanka's hardening stance towards the West, with officials regularly accusing the UN and foreign aid groups of supporting or colluding with Tamil Tigers.

After months of heavy fighting, the Tigers are said by the military to be down to their last few hundred fighters.

In the latest fighting, Sri Lanka's navy said that it sank six rebel boats and killed at least 25 guerrillas in a pre-dawn sea battle on Wednesday.

Courtesy: AFP.org