Nacho
where do you get your numbers
Troops and the Tamil Tigers continued to face each other across the front lines that fringe territory held by the separatists in the north.
There were sporadic confrontations and the military said 35 Tiger fighters were killed as well as two soldiers.
But some have doubts about the casualties being reported.
'If you add up all the figures given by the government from the beginning of the separatist war until now, it would have wiped out the population of the north twice over,' says Iqbal Athas, consultant editor and defence correspondent of the Colombo Sunday Times and correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly.
'Similarly if one were to adopt the figures put out by the Tamil Tiger rebels, that would have depleted the ranks of the military considerably.'
Journalists barred
Since the start of 2006, when a new chapter opened in the civil war between the government and the rebels who want an independent state for the Tamil ethnic minority, the government's Media Centre for National Security says 6,867 Tiger fighters and 1,501 soldiers have been killed.
Your propaganda or your reports must be based on truth
Maj Gen Perera
Of the rebel losses, just over 2000 have taken place this year up to the 19 of March, the Media Centre reports. The centre says the armed forces' losses since the first of January are number 186.
A news agency which has counted up casualty figures posted on the Ministry of Defence website has come up with slightly different numbers.
Journalists are barred from the conflict areas, and Nordic ceasefire monitors left the island when the truce formally came to an end in January, so there can be no independent confirmation.
The Tigers themselves are not putting out many figures of their own.
Intercepted transmissions
The military recovers few bodies of dead rebel fighters, saying doing so would pointlessly risk the lives of troops.
Instead, they say they rely on reports from soldiers on the ground, and intercepted radio transmissions.
The Tigers have been waging a decades-old war against Colombo
'When an incident occurs when they got a beating, the immediate tendency is to inform how many they lost, how many they got injured and to inform their cadres and get the reinforcements back,' said the military's spokesman, Brig Udaya Nanayakkara.
'If they try to use the codeword, it will take some time therefore they use the quickest possible method to inform their higher ups, so that's how we get to know.'
Brig Nanayakkara said he stood by the military's figures and that the Tigers were down to around 5-6,000 fighters at the beginning of this year from an estimated 12,000.
Edited By - Berty - 1 Sep 2008 03:00:43 GMT |