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The accounts of these boys and girls who surrendered to the Sri Lankan army were shocking. They say they were dragged screaming from their families and sent into action with only a few days of basic training. The older members of the LTTE warned them to keep firing and advancing, or they would be shot by their own side from behind.

Those who did try to escape said they were fired on by their own side. Children who were recaptured had their hair shaved off to mark them as deserters and boys were beaten.

In an interview with the BBC, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said the LTTE rebels could not be trusted to give up "terrorism".

The rebels had said they would give up violence after their leader was killed in recent fighting in the north-east.

IT was a desperate last phone call but it did not sound like a man who would be dead within hours. Balasingham Nadesan, political leader of the Tamil Tigers, had nowhere to turn, it seemed.

“We are putting down our arms,” he told me late last Sunday night by satellite phone from the tiny slip of jungle and beach on the northeast coast of Sri Lanka where the Tigers had been making their last stand.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his army have turned the conventional wisdom on fighting insurgencies on its head, adopting strategies and tactics long discredited, both in the battlefield and in the military classroom. Since they appear to have worked against the Tigers, other countries wracked by insurgencies — from Pakistan to Sudan to Algeria — may be tempted to follow suit. But Rajapaksa's triumph has come at a high cost in civilian lives and a sharp decline in democratic values — and he is no closer to resolving the ethnic resentments that underpinned the insurgency for decades.

U.N. Security Council members see no point withholding an IMF loan or taking other steps to punish Sri Lanka, the council's president said, the same day Sri Lanka's president rejected international calls for a ceasefire with rebels.

"I have not heard anyone suggesting that," Mexican Ambassador Claude Heller, president of the 15-nation council, told reporters on Thursday after an informal session on Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka has denied reports that a proposed loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is being delayed by the US, officials say.

American officials said the move was aimed at putting pressure on Colombo to do more to help civilians caught up in the fighting in the north.

But a senior Sri Lankan official says the talks are on schedule.

Sri Lanka has been holding talks with the IMF for a loan of nearly a $2bn to weather the global economic crisis.

International concern

From U.S. government funded news service:

Rebels in Sri Lanka claim some 150,000 people are on the brink of starvation in the territory held by the Tamil Tigers in the northeast. The Sri Lankan government says the rebels are to blame for the plight of the civilians in the remaining area controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The accusations come amid rising international concern over mass civilian suffering in the dwindling war zone.

Thousands more civilians surged out of Sri Lanka's war zone on Wednesday, while soldiers and Tamil Tiger rebels fought the apparent endgame of Asia's longest-running war despite calls to protect those still trapped.

. . .

On Tuesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross had said the war zone situation was "catastrophic," with several hundred killed since Monday and at least 50,000 more remaining at risk with limited food, water and medical care.