All-out war possible in Sri Lanka if talks fail

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — In what could be the last, best hope for averting all-out war, the government of this island nation and the rebel Tamil Tigers are due to sit down today for their first face-to-face talks in months over one of Asia's most intractable conflicts.

Both sides have been stung by heavy losses and international criticism in recent weeks, following a surge in combat that has left hundreds of people dead and thousands more refugees in their own country, forced to flee homes and livelihoods to avoid getting caught in the crossfire.

In such a charged atmosphere, no one is predicting that any substantive advances will be made at the negotiating table. But so fierce has been the fighting that getting the two longtime adversaries to meet today and Sunday in Geneva is being trumpeted as achievement enough.

The violence threatens to engulf the whole of this teardrop-shaped island, spilling over from the north and east, where the fighting had, until recently, mostly been confined and where the highly armed, highly motivated rebels want to establish an independent homeland for Sri Lanka's ethnic-minority Tamils.

Military checkpoints now ring this capital, in the southwest, amid fears of further attacks like the mine explosion that nearly killed the Pakistani ambassador in a brazen assassination attempt two months ago. Last week, Tamil Tiger suicide bombers aboard fishing boats shocked the Sri Lankan navy by mounting an assault on a naval base at Galle, a southern port city popular with tourists and far from the traditional theater of war.

Both sides, their casualty counts spiraling since July, are now licking their wounds. They are also under intense diplomatic pressure, much of it from major donor countries, to go back to a cease-fire deal inked in 2002 but rendered defunct since late last year, when fighting broke wide open again.

Earlier this week, Sri Lankan officials unveiled seven areas of discussion they want to pursue with the rebels, including human-rights violations and the recruitment of children as fighters, a tactic for which the Tamil Tigers are notorious. Also on the agenda are issues of economic development and greater autonomy in the north and east.