Sri Lankan soldiers battled on Tuesday inside the last town the Tamil Tiger separatists control, and the government said it had no plans for a truce amid UN and EU calls for a halt to fighting. Soldiers from the 58th Division entered Puthukudiyiruppu township after heavy fighting.
That is the last actual town the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) still control; after that there are only a handful of small coastal villages left. "They are inside Puthukudiyiruppu and fighting to take control," defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella, also a minister, said.
On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon urged a "suspension of fighting" to allow tens of thousands of civilians to escape while the European Union urged an outright cease-fire and condemned the LTTE for forcibly keeping people in the war zone. Both followed an LTTE offer of a cease-fire on Monday, in which it refused to surrender and urged the international community to push for the former. The government has long said the Tigers have a choice: surrender or be destroyed.
Rambukwella dubbed the LTTE cease-fire call "hilarious" in an interview with the state-run Daily News, and said the Tigers had repeatedly manufactured civilian crises to get a truce when they were close to defeat and needed time to rearm. The LTTE has never been closer to a military defeat than it is now. On Monday, Reuters was at the frontline just to the west of the Puthukudiyiruppu town centre, where 58 Division commander, Brigadier Shavendra Silva, said: "It's the last objective." Silva at the time said he was measuring the war in days, and not weeks.