Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 25, 1990 TAG: 9003251900
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA LENGTH: Medium
"They came on a peace mission, but then they got bogged down," said Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ranjan Wijeratne as he watched turbaned Sikh soldiers of the Indian peace-keeping force board a ship while a military band played "Auld Lang Syne."
During nearly three years of fighting in Sri Lanka, 1,155 Indian soldiers died and several thousand more were wounded, according to the Indian army. Others have put the casualty figures higher.
The final departure from Sri Lanka of the Indian force, which arrived under a bilateral treaty in 1987 and eventually swelled to 50,000 soldiers, was hailed by Sri Lankans as the beginning of a peaceful era in a country torn for years by ethnic fratricide.
Indian army officers and soldiers said Saturday that they had successfully completed their mission in Sri Lanka, but they left having met few of their original goals.
The Indian troops arrived on the island pledging to protect Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority and to disarm militant groups, but the Indians wound up fighting a bitter war against Tamil separatists and have now left the north of the island in control of the well-armed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The Liberation Tigers, originally a small but militant Tamil nationalistic group armed and supported by India, have long advocated the establishment of a separate Tamil state known as Eelam in northern Sri Lanka. But India, which began fighting the group almost as soon as its soldiers arrived in Sri Lanka, now opposes the idea of Eelam, and the guerrillas no longer emphasize full secession, concentrating instead on consolidating their new-found political and military power in the north.
by CNB