Sri Lankan officials on Sunday disavowed rebel claims that government troops had indiscriminately shelled a no-fire zone, killing many civilians Saturday night and Sunday morning.
The accusations came after the government announced Thursday that it had “re-demarcated” the no-fire zone to encompass a new area 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) long and 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mile) wide. Earlier, the zone had encompassed more than 6 square kilometers (3.7 square miles). The zone had been designated to protect civilians trapped by fighting between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels. More than 2,000 were “feared dead,” many of them women and children, after government shelling, according to the rebel Web site Tamilnet.com. The exact number of victims had yet to be tallied, the site said. But a government official told CNN that there was no shelling in the no-fire zone during that time. CNN could not independently verify the accounts, because the government does not allow members of the news media independent access to areas where it is fighting the rebels.
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On Friday, a group of independent U.N. experts urged the U.N. Human Rights Council to investigate what it called a “critical” situation in Sri Lanka. “There is good reason to believe that thousands of civilians have been killed in the past three months alone, and yet the Sri Lankan government has yet to account for the casualties, or to provide access to the war zone for journalists and humanitarian monitors of any type,” U.N. expert Philip Alston said in a statement issued in Geneva, Switzerland. Government troops have closed in on rebel forces in a shrinking section of the country’s north, and civilians have been caught in crossfire. Accounts vary widely about how many have been trapped. As recently as last week, a military spokesman put the number at 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, while Tamilnet.com said, “reliable reports … put it to more than 120,000.” More than 196,000 people have fled the battle zone, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Tamil Tiger rebels have been fighting for an independent state in Sri Lanka’s northeast since 1983. As many as 70,000 people have been killed since the civil war began, and the group has been declared a terrorist organization by the European Union and more than 30 countries, including the United States.
