Sri Lankan foreign minister dismisses doctors' claims of killings

Dead Sea: The final engagement between the Sri Lankan government forces and the Tamil Tigers, LTTE, which is going on at the moment, is the culmination of three years of successful tough military action, said Rohitha Bollolagama, Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum, he dismissed claims of thousands of government killings made by two doctors, currently in the area still held by the Tigers, arguing that they were speaking under serious threat from the Tigers. Bollolagama said that if he was held by the Tigers, he himself might well say anything that they wanted.

His confidence that this fight could be won after almost 30 years of continual fighting, was due to his government's decision to take the fight to the Tigers. He explained his optimism over this strategy in answer to a question from Gulf News, pointing out that when the present government took power in 2005, they tried to negotiate with the Tigers for nine months and found it useless.

So they abrogated the deal the previous government made with the Tigers and took determined military action. They recaptured the Eastern Province by 2007, and held elections in 2008, and now a former boy-soldier is running the new provincial government, which has raised its contribution to Sri Lanka's GDP from one per cent in 2006 to four per cent last year.

In answer to questions about lack of humanitarian help for the tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the fighting, Bollolagama said that the government is doing all it can to get them out while also winning the war at the same time. “We have rescued 200,000 civilians,'' he said.

Looking ahead to after the fighting, Bollolagama looked forward to elections in the Northern Province, and a return to normal government. He said that the captured Tigers would be arrested, and dealt with according to the law. He argued that they do not have any political support in the country, and described the Tigers are a fascist, separatist, extremist group which has engaged in a wide variety of crimes to earn money such drug running, human trafficking, and money laundering.