Twenty seven lorries flying Red Cross flags wended their way on 30 September through the thick Tamil Tiger-held Vanni jungles of northern Sri Lanka into government military territory. The lorries were not carrying medical supplies or food. Instead, 600 or so decomposing bodies made up the convoy´s macabre cargo. These were the remains of soldiers that had been handed over to the Red Cross by the rebels following a bloody battle in northern Sri Lanka some days before.
For a government which had been claiming that the civil war was 95 percent won, September´s fighting was a debacle. After a two-day siege, the Tamil Tigers captured Kilinochchi, a key military base in the northern battlefield; the Sri Lankan military had to be content with a consolation prize – the capture of Mankulam, a rebel-held town some kilometres south of Kilinochchi.
The latest wave of fighting began on 27 September when LTTE rebels attacked soldiers near Paranthan and Kilinochchi, two towns close to the northern peninsula. The peninsula was captured by government soldiers in 1995. But the area is isolated, with no road link to the mainland, and the government was forced to send supplies by air and sea. And since May last year, the government forces had been trying to secure a road through rebel-controlled territory in what has become the longest military offensive in the civil war. Mankulam had been hailed for many months as the last rebel bastion on the roadway linking the Jaffna peninsula with the rest, of the island. In reality, though, the "last rebel bastion" had now merely moved to Kilinochchi. How much further it is going to move is a matter of conjecture, but what was blatantly evident during the last round of heavy fighting, and of greater significance than the rhetoric about battle victories, was that more than 1300 people were killed in one of the biggest and bloodiest battles in Sri Lanka´s 15-year-old civil war.
Evident, that is, to everyone but Sri Lankans, for since June the government has begun censoring war reporting by the media. Both local and foreign correspondents are covered by the censorship although news organisations outside the country get around by filing stories using a dateline outside Sri Lanka. Most Lankans, however, know only what the government wants them to know, and what is churned out by the rumour mill.