COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka's president rejected Thursday a cease-fire appeal from France and Britain, saying his government was working to protect civilians but that his forces would not end their fight against the Tamil Tigers.
Mahinda Rajapaksa said Western governments should stop lecturing him — a day after the French and British foreign ministers met with him to try to broker a truce in the nation's bloody civil war to safeguard tens of thousands of civilians trapped in the conflict zone.
"The government is not ready to enter into any kind of cease-fire with the terrorists," he said, referring to the Tamil Tiger rebel group.
Rajapaksa said his government was trying to rescue the trapped civilians.
"It is my duty to protect the people of this country. I don't need lectures from Western representatives," he said in a speech distributed by his office.
The U.N. says nearly 6,500 civilians have been killed in fighting over the past three months.
The Tamil Tigers said Thursday they would not surrender to the advancing Sri Lankan forces and asked the international community to work harder to stop the war that the U.N. says has killed 6,500 civilians in the most recent fighting.
"If any country really cares about these people, I ask that country to go beyond its 'diplomatic boundaries' for the sake of saving human lives and make Sri Lanka stop this genocidal war," rebel political chief Balasingam Nadesan told The Associated Press in an e-mail interview from the war zone.
In recent months, government troops have forced the Tamil Tigers out of the shadow state they controlled in the north of the country and cornered them in a tiny sliver of land along the northeast coast.
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