BATTICALOA district in eastern Sri Lanka hangs tensely between the security forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Large tracts of land in the district are under the control of the LTTE. And people living in these areas have of late been providing the cannon fodder for its armed struggle.
Like 10-year-old Sivaruban of Vakkarai, 45 km north of Batticaloa. When the LTTE began a recruitment drive in the village three months ago, his widowed mother moved out with him and his 16-year-old sister to an Army-controlled village in Valachenai to protect them. But to no avail. The recruiters came knocking at her door on September 15, and Sivaruban had to go with them.
So did 10-year-old Thevaruban, also of Vakkarai. The LTTE wanted to recruit his elder brother, but the boy was away in Colombo. So they took away Thevaruban as a guarantee to ensure that his brother would return to Batticaloa and sign up with them. The parents were later told that Thevaruban was being given military training and would return when the LTTE concluded its mission.
These and many other instances of the LTTE's recruitment of children, with names of the recruits, their parents' names and address, are contained in a recent report by the University Teachers' Human Rights of Jaffna (UTHR).
It has been public knowledge that the LTTE uses minors in its separatist war. It is difficult to say just how many under-age cadres the LTTE has, but there is no doubt that children have been part of the group's military machine since the early 1990s.
For civilians and LTTE cadres alike, the region affords an ease of movement between areas controlled by the two sides. As the LTTE looked to expand its strength for the battles ahead, its road-show, a regular feature of the recruitment drive, would stop at schools to screen videos of battles past. The recruiters, not much older than the school-children themselves, would exhort them to sign up for the cause. There is no denying that at first many of them volunteered, moved by stories of atrocities against the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan state. And many more might have been lured by the machismo and romance of guns and fatigues. With the LTTE at the height of its popularity with the Tamil people then, parents did little to stop them.
But the realisation soon dawned that the blood was not ketchup, and that death was real. The turning point came perhaps at Weli Oya in July 1995 when an attack on the Army camp there proved disastrous for the LTTE. The television pictures later put out by the Defence Ministry told their own story: rows upon rows of dead children, who had been in the vanguard of the attack. Had the bodies not been mangled, they might have been mistaken for sleeping children.
From the mid-1990s, there were reports of parents beseiging LTTE camps and demanding their children back and of school teachers trying to stop video-screenings in their classrooms.
In May 1998, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Children and Armed Conflict Olara Otunnu visited Sri Lanka and travelled to an LTTE area in the north, where he met the group's representatives, including its ideologue Anton Balasingham and its political wing leader S. Thamilchelvam.
The LTTE pledged to Otunnu that it would not use children under 18 in combat, and would not recruit anyone below 17 years of age. But it is clear from the UTHR report and other accounts that this is a commitment that the LTTE has been observing mainly in the breach.
One ready-made source for child soldiers is said to be the Chencholai (Red-Blossomed Gardens), a chain of orphanages set up by the LTTE.
According to the UTHR, parents have stopped sending their children to school in the LTTE-controlled areas of Batticaloa for fear they might be waylaid by press-gangs. Many, like Sivaruban's mother, are moving to Army-controlled areas for protection.
A pamphlet bearing the LTTE insignia was distributed in Valachennai in early October asking parents to give voluntarily one child to the "liberation struggle".
Refusal to comply with this request has been met with punishment. Property belonging to those who said they would not give up their children have been confiscated. Notices now hang on the houses of three people in Pankudaveli, proclaiming the pieces of property as those of the LTTE, and prohibiting entry into them. In Kokkadicholai, parents who resisted the call were beaten with palm fronds. One mother was asked to perform squats (thoppukarnam) and her son and daughter were taken away. Three other women were imprisoned. The UTHR alleged that more than a dozen traumatised parents had committed suicide.
Alarmed by the happenings, a delegation of Tamil representatives led by the Bishop of Batticaloa, Reverend Kingsley Swamipillai, crossed military lines to meet the area LTTE leader Karikalan on September 25. According to accounts of the meeting, Karikalan denied that the LTTE was recruiting children forcibly and showed them a videotape in which parents giving in their children were shown declaring that they were doing so voluntarily.
The delegation returned without achieving anything. According to the UTHR, this only goes to show that leading members of Tamil society have lost all influence with the Tigers and are unable to assert that they be granted even the most basic humanitarian rights.
On the other hand, the Tamil press glorifies child warriors, with glowing accounts of ceremonies at which parents hand over their children for the Tamil cause.
Both Amnesty International and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have been critical of the LTTE for not honouring its commitment to the U.N. on the issue of child soldiers, but the UTHR charged that not much was done to rein in the group. The international aid agencies working in northern Sri Lanka would like to avoid a confrontation with the LTTE so that their work can continue, it said.
Says the UTHR report: "There can be no neutrality in the face of such crime. If the organisations representing the world community are not seen to take a clear position on this matter, their presence becomes largely meaningless for the ordinary people. On the other hand, a clear stand by them will also help local civil society groups, and finally the parents themselves, to defy the LTTE."
