COLOMBO: As Sri Lanka slides deeper into a new chapter of a two-decade civil war, fresh peace talks are a distant prospect until either the Tamil Tiger rebels or the military gain the upper hand, analysts say.

The Tigers are furious at President Mahinda Rajapakse’s refusal to recognise their de facto state in the north and east as a separate homeland for minority Tamils, and ultimately want to recapture the eastern port of Trincomalee and northern Jaffna peninsula — which is now occupied by around 40,000 troops.

Rajapakse is a majority Sinhalese nationalist who refuses to compromise Sri Lanka’s territorial sovereignty — and who must juggle the demands of hardline Marxist and Buddhist monk political allies who hate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

“I can’t see anyone getting back to peace talks until a clear change in the balance of power on the ground has been accepted, and likewise with the ceasefire,” said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a private think-tank.

“It has now come to a situation in which the only interaction they can have is on the battlefield,” he added.

Peace broker Norway was quick to play down expectations from a new visit by special envoy Jon Hanssen-Bauer, who arrived on Friday to discuss the future of the island’s Nordic truce monitors.

“I don’t know what the hell Hanssen-Bauer is going to talk about,” Saravanamuttu said.

The government and the LTTE separately say they remain committed to a 2002 ceasefire, but truce monitors, diplomats and even some military officials say a war that has killed more than 65,000 since 1983 has resumed to a greater or lesser degree.

Each side accuses the other of pulling out of the truce, and is keen to avoid blame for the collapse of the island’s protracted peace process.

“Now it has gone beyond the realm of a low intensity war,” said Iqbal Athas, an analyst for Jane’s Defence Weekly. “In my view, Eelam War IV has already started.

“The confrontations are no longer isolated or focused on one particular area. Both in the north and east confrontations are widespread,” he added. “What is happening is no different to what happened during the other phases of the war.”

Athas sees the LTTE drive into government-held parts of the eastern Muslim town of Mutur, which has been flattened by artillery fire and whose tens of thousands of residents are now fleeing, as a plan to destabilise the east and choke the maritime supply route to the Jaffna.

Senior eastern LTTE political leader S. Elilan told Reuters in an interview this week the ceasefire was now null and void because of government air strikes on rebel areas in a bid to settle a water supply dispute.

“The war is on and we are ready,” Elilan said. “The war has begun. It is the government which has started the war.”

In the early stages of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the LTTE launched attacks on civilian as well as military targets. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.

The Tigers have focused on the military in the latter years, particularly in the bloodiest period of the war, from 1997-1999, when around 4,000 people were killed.

“There are different definitions of war. And if you take the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, they say 500 killed in a year — then there’s war,” said Major-General Ulf Henricsson, head of the Nordic mission which oversees the truce.—Reuters