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Sri Lankan president says true freedom won with defeat of rebels

Other News Materials 4 February 2009 09:57 (UTC +04:00)

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse said Wednesday that his country had been able to win true freedom with his campaign to crush the Tamil Tiger rebellion.

"I am proud to announce that today we celebrate the independence of the motherland that is being united," Rajapakse told a ceremony for the island's 61st anniversary of independence from Britain.

Rajapakse said 30 of the 61 years of independence since 1948 were spent tackling the affects of brutal separatist terrorism -- as a result of the over three-decade-old campaign led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on behalf of the Tamil minority.

"We were forced to live with the action of an illegal armed terrorist movement," Rajapakse said.

He blamed the LTTE for collectively massacring innocent civilians and even carrying out ethnic cleansing.

Rajapakse said his military was able to defeat the campaign of the LTTE in order to safeguard the territorial integrity of the island nation, Xinhua reports.

He appealed to Sri Lankans living overseas to return to the island as peace had now been restored, adding that his troops would completely crush the Tamil Tiger rebels within a short period of time.

Rajapakse since being elected the president in late 2005 waged a full scale military campaign against the LTTE.

In January his troops dismantled the rebels' administrative capital of Kilinochchi and are currently poised to completely defeat the LTTE by taking the rest of the territory in Mullaithivu, the last district partly held by the LTTE.

Claiming discrimination at the hands of Sinhalese dominated governments, the LTTE has been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east since the 1980s, resulting in the killing of more than 70,000 people.

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