Top Sri Lankan: Cease-Fire Meaningless

COLOMBO Sri Lanka -- Sri Lanka's cease-fire with the Tamil Tiger rebels has "no meaning," the country's top defense official said Thursday, suggesting it was only being officially left in place to satisfy the international community.

The 2002 cease-fire had brought a measure of relief to Sri Lanka, beset for nearly a quarter-century by the Tigers' bloody fight for an ethnic Tamil minority homeland.

But in the last 18 months, the cease-fire almost entirely unraveled as tit-for-tat attacks grew into an undeclared all-out war, with the Tigers employing tactics ranging from suicide bombing to an air raid.

Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse said in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press that "there is no cease-fire agreement. There is no meaning in that."

"Officially we have not said there is no cease-fire agreement, probably to keep the international community happy," added Rajapakse, who is the brother and a close confidant of President Mahinda Rajapakse.

His comments were a marked departure from earlier statements by top officials, who even as the violence has escalated have insisted they respect the cease-fire and fight only in response to Tiger provocations.

The interview also appeared to confirm what many diplomats, aid workers and analysts here suspect _ that the government is only paying lip service to the cease-fire, which is viewed by the United States and European donors as a tool that keeps the entire peace process from collapsing.

The Tigers were "breaking it from the very beginning, starting ambushes and (land mines) and all those things so then the military has to react," said Rajapakse, who survived a December suicide bombing by the rebels that killed three people.

The rebels, who offered no immediate comment on Rajapakse's remarks, have previously countered such accusations by saying it is they who are being targeted and forced to respond.

Rajapakse and his two brothers _ Mahinda, the president and Basil Rajapakse, a presidential adviser _ control much of the government and are believed to be largely in agreement on major issues.

But Gotabhaya Rajapakse is publicly the most hard-line, advocating tough actions as what many see as the "bad cop" to his brothers' more diplomatic "good cop" act.

Violence has intensified in recent weeks with the military stepping up a push to clear the insurgents from eastern Sri Lanka. Gotabhaya Rajapakse said the campaign has been largely successful, with the rebels now confined to a small area of jungle cut off from resupply or reinforcement.