By C. Bryson Hull and Ranga Sirilal
COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka has for the first time made public its heavy casualties from the last phase of the 25-year war, as the U.N. chief flew to the island on Friday to push for a rapid end to a lingering humanitarian crisis.
Officials said over 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 injured since a battle in July 2006 that the military marks as the start of "Eelam War IV," the final stage of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Sri Lanka declared total victory over the LTTE on Monday after killing off its leadership and remaining fighters in a climactic final battle in the northeast of the island.
Nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians who followed or were taken by the Tigers as the military relentlessly cornered them, are now in crowded displacement camps after fleeing in the final months of what was Asia's longest modern war.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on his way to Sri Lanka, will call on the government to allow aid agencies to have full access to the camps and push for a political solution, U.N. officials said.
"Since (the July 2006 battle at) Mavil Aru, 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded," Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa told the state-run Independent Television Network.
Troops killed 22,000 LTTE fighters during Eelam War IV, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.
The LTTE had fought to create the separate nation that it called Eelam -- the Tamil word for homeland -- in northern and eastern Sri Lanka
The government had previously given casualty figures only erratically, and stopped reporting them entirely last year, mindful of a public that might not stomach heavy losses.
TENS OF THOUSANDS DEAD
The United Nations this week said the conflict had killed between 80,000-100,000 people since it erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983 -- including unofficial and unverified tallies showing 7,000 civilian deaths since January.
Pro-LTTE groups say thousands of civilians died in the last few weeks as a result of indiscriminate shelling and firing by Sri Lankan troops.
The government does not give a civilian casualty figure, but says it did not use heavy weapons in the final months and blamed the Tigers for civilian deaths. It says the United Nations numbers were inflated by the LTTE to secure pressure for a truce.
Western governments and the United Nations human rights chief have called for probes into potential war crimes and humanitarian rights violations by both sides.
Ban's chief of staff, in Sri Lanka since last week, said the world body's first priority was the welfare of refugees.
"I don't think we need to be straight away rushing into all kinds of allegations," Ban's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, told reporters in Colombo. "The idea is to say that in the conduct of all these things, we have to tell them there are norms."
U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes has said the camps are up to international standards with the exception of restrictions on freedom of movement. The military says it needs time to weed out Tiger infiltrators before it can allow that.
On Thursday, President Mahinda Rajapaksa told visiting Indian envoys that he planned to have most people returned to their homes within six months.
He also called for all Sri Lankans to be magnanimous, to ensure the victory over the LTTE was not viewed as a defeat of the Tamil minority.
"The government's efforts should necessarily be anchored on its discussions with diverse Tamil groups and their representatives regarding the future political solution through a credible devolution of power," Nambiar said.
Sri Lanka has committed to begin implementing devolution of political power to Tamils as laid out in the 22-year-old Indo-Sri Lanka Accord brokered by India in its first attempt to stop a war watched keenly by its own 60 million Tamils.
Sri Lankan Tamils lost the favoured status they enjoyed under the British colonial government when it handed power over to the Sinhalese majority at independence in 1948. Tamils suffered discrimination and abuse under several subsequent governments.
(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau in Frankfurt; Editing by David Fox)
