Fighting rages in northern Sri Lanka in fourth week of hostilities

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Government soldiers and ethnic Tamil rebels traded artillery fire in northern Sri Lanka on Tuesday, a military official said, and schools closed over fears that civilians could be targeted by the insurgents.

Clashes in northern and eastern Sri Lanka over the past four weeks have undermined the country's already shaky cease-fire. The violence continued unabated on the northern Jaffna Peninsula, the heartland of the island's Tamil minority.

A military spokesman, Brig. Athula Jayawardana, said soldiers faced sporadic attacks by Tamil Tiger insurgents around Muhumalai, a village along the frontier separating government and rebel territory.

Jayawardana said soldiers had recovered the bodies of 79 rebels out of more than 200 believed killed in intense fighting over the weekend. He said 90 soldiers and sailors were also killed.

The Tigers had no immediate comment on the death claim, but each side routinely disputes figures offered by the other, and reliable casualty counts are nearly impossible to come by.

Aid workers estimate 100,000 people have been displaced in northern and eastern Sri Lanka since July by the fighting, the worst since the cease-fire was put into place in 2002.

In the port of Jaffna, on the tip of the northern peninsula, a curfew was imposed over the weekend, and many of the city's 500,000 people rush to secure food, fuel and other supplies during daily two-hour breaks in the clampdown.

But with the city virtually cut off by the fighting, prices were rising fast. Black market kerosene was going for more than double its normal price of about 60 cents per quart. Mobile phones are barely working, and the city has only about an hour of electricity a day.

Government officials, representatives of the U.N. children's fund and a Jaffna judge were negotiating Tuesday with military and rebel commanders on the possibility of evacuating some 100 children at a home trapped in the fighting. The home run by Roman Catholic nuns is in the village of Osan, said K. Ganesh, the chief government bureaucrat in the area.

The 4-year-old truce was intended to halt more than two decades of war between the government, dominated by Sri Lanka's 14 million Sinhalese, and the rebels, who have been fighting since 1983 for an independent homeland for the country's 3.2 million Tamils.