Plea for calm by church in Colombo

Please stop playing with human blood – Rev. Chickera

(February 09, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Even as the Sri Lankan forces and the LTTE separatists traded charges of battle excesses and made counter-claims regarding the casualties inflicted on each other, the Anglican Church in Colombo blamed both for the increased blood-letting and appealed to them to spare the civilians, particularly children. Colombo’s bishop, Rev Duleep de Chickera in a ‘special message’ said civilians were the worst hit in the air force bombings of villages in the north and the Tigers’ terror strikes in the south. The LTTE strategy of terror could turn counterproductive and “lead to the conversion of moderates to extremism,” the bishop said.

He also expressed grave concern about the fate of civilians, especially children, in the spate of Air Force bombardments in the north. Drawing attention to the two houses for children run by his church in the Tamil north, he said: “I am aware that these little friends of mine live in fear and have nowhere to run except into their bunkers when the planes arrive. Please do everything possible to avoid harming these little ones.” Meanwhile, the army on Friday claimed it had captured a ‘strategic’ one sq km area from the LTTE south of Adampan tank in Mannar region in north-west Lanka, killing 12 Tigers and losing two soldiers in the operation. In all, 49 Tamil rebels and three soldiers were killed in the various battle engagements in the north-east region over the last couple of days, according to the state-run Media Centre for National Security (MCNS).

The LTTE operations command in the north said at least 13 army soldiers were killed and 28 wounded in the last three days in the clashes in Mannar and Vavuniya—six of them in the aborted push towards Adampan of Mannar. A Tiger commander told reporters in Vanni that the LTTE had inflicting casualties among the army soldiers while beating back their incursions in Mannar. The pro-LTTE website TamilNet said the Tigers took reporters on a tour to Naakarkoyil forward-defense-line (FDL) to show the weapons they had seized from the beaten-back military.