JAFFNA, SRI LANKA, June 15, 2007: The nights here are once again broken by artillery fire across the black lagoon. The road out of this peninsula has been closed since last August, making the area nearly inaccessible. Though food and fuel manage to arrive, shopkeepers are reluctant to keep stocks, not knowing when they may have to close up and run. By 7 p.m., barely sundown, stray dogs have the run of Jaffna’s streets. The city’s people are indoors well before an 8 o’clock curfew. Soldiers linger at the edges of the alleys. “Anytime, anything can happen,” said Ravindran Ramanathan, a tailor. “People are afraid of everything.” At least 15,000 are waiting to get on government ships to the relative safety of Colombo, the capital.
This is Jaffna, the picturesque prize of Sri Lanka’s ethnic civil war, girding for a new storm. The army commander for the area, Maj. Gen. G. A. Chandrasiri, said he expected a major battle for Jaffna before the August monsoon. No other place in Sri Lanka is so scarred because no place carries Jaffna’s special curse: it is the heart of the homeland that the Tamil Tigers have fought to carve out, and the trophy that soldiers and rebels have fought over for nearly 25 years. A 2002 cease-fire, which had stanched the bloodshed for a time, has collapsed. For a year, fighting has spread across the island between the Sri Lankan military, dominated by the ethnic Sinhalese majority, and the separatist force called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. According to the Defense Ministry, more than 4,800 people, civilians and fighters, have been killed since December 2005. Though the number is not entirely reliable, it points to a significantly lethal period even by the standards of this long, ugly war. It is likely to continue. Peace talks are nowhere on the horizon. Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’s influential defense secretary, says the military is under instructions to eliminate the rebel leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, and eradicate his organization once and for all. “That’s our main aim, to destroy the leadership,” Mr. Rajapakse said in an interview in May. The job, he said, would take two to three years.
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