TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka: The last Indian soldiers on this tropical island nation sailed away through China Bay Saturday morning and headed home, ending a costly military intervention in which Sri Lankan guerrillas stymied the Indian army, the world’s fourth largest.
“They came on a peace mission, but then they got bogged down,” said Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ranjan Wijeratne as he watched turbaned Sikh soldiers of the Indian Peace keeping force board a ship while a military band played, “Auld Lang Syne”.
During nearly three years of fighting in Sri Lanka, 1,155 Indian soldiers died and several thousand more were wounded, according to the Indian army.
The final departure from Sri Lanka of the Indian force, which arrived under a bilateral treaty in 1987 and eventually swelled to 50,000 soldiers, was hailed by Sri Lanka as the beginning of a peaceful era in a country torn for years by ethnic fratricide.
Indian army officers and soldiers said Saturday they successfully completed their mission in Sri Lanka, but they left having met few of their original goals.
The Indian troops arrived on the island pledging to protect Sri Lanka’s ethnic Tamil minority and to disarm militant groups, but the Indians wound up fighting a bitter war against Tamil separatists.
Article extracted from this publication >> March 30, 1990
