After an exchange of messages and obtaining clearance from the Brigade Commander, Batticaloa, a delegation led by the Rt. Rev. Kingsley Swampillai, Bishop of Batticaloa and Trincomalee, crossed the lagoon from Paddiruppu and met the LTTE at their office in Ambalanthurai. This was at 10.30 AM on 25th September. The delegation also included Mr.Pathmanathan, representing the Swamy at the Ramakrishna Mission, Mr.Sugunathas representing the Methodist Church, Mr.Kamalanathan the local NGO sector and Mr.Martyn representing the Batticaloa Peace Committee.

The LTTE was represented by its Eastern commander, Mr.Karikalan himself. The religious leaders voiced their concerns guardedly and listened to Karikalan’s explanations. The result was revealing in many respects, particularly as regards the powerlessness of the Tamil people before their acclaimed leaders.

Bishop Swampillai told Karikalan that people were talking about forced recruitment by his group. The latter replied that this was incorrect and that the parents were giving their children to the LTTE voluntarily. To back this claim, he showed the visitors a video of supposedly such an event. The claim was belied by the scene of mothers shedding tears in profusion. Karikalan however made an important concession. He said that those who had given a child often pressed their neighbours to follow suit.

When the subject of [more than a dozen] suicides by parents having to part with their children was raised, Karikalan put it down to quarrels between the parents themselves: If a mother, say, gave a child, the father might pick a quarrel with her and swallow sleeping tablets. Karikalan denied that they were confiscating the properties of those who declined to contribute a child. He said that they were only protecting the properties of persons who left and would give it back when they returned. This again as several incidents above, which took place well after this meeting, show, is a blatant falsehood.

Karikalan made no concession to the concerns of the religious leaders and held forth about the need to liberate the land and their aims and methods. He said that this struggle was not a career for them and they would like to end it soon. It was appropriate, he said, that every family should contribute a fighter so that they would feel it to be their struggle. It is because they did not want people to suffer during the coming months of fighting, he continued, that they had asked the people to store 3 months’ rations. Batticaloa town, he said, would be liberated by January 2002 and the struggle will go on with added strength.

The Bishop interjected that they [the LTTE] had made similar utterances when they declared a final war in 1990. The outcome, he observed, was that the LTTE fled to the jungles, leaving the people to suffer enormous reprisal violence. Karikalan replied that they were not ready then, but they are now.( It was the same Karikalan who was in charge in the East in 1990!)

Reflecting the anxieties of the delegation, one member expressed the hope that there would be peace before all this violence takes place. Karikalan dismissed the idea saying that the Government is not interested in peace and laughed. Everyone laughed at the irony of the hope.

The question then arose about the fate of members of the other Tamil groups when the LTTE’s ‘liberation’ of Batticaloa is accomplished. Karikalan said that if these other groups join now their fight for liberation, they would welcome them with open arms. But should they fall into their hands after the fight, he added, they would all be massacred.

Throughout the discussion the religious leaders did not contest the LTTE’s contentions, but only indicated that they had a different view of things, especially the ongoing recruitment. In closing, Bishop Swampillai made what in normal circumstances would be an ironical plea to an acclaimed liberation leader. He told Karikalan ‘to see that the people are not harmed in the process of liberating them’.

What this exchange indicated is the alarming fact of leading members of Tamil society having lost all influence with their acclaimed leaders. They were even unable to make the most routine humanitarian demands from them. Through their extreme caution, even the Tamil religious leaders have allowed their authority and initiative to be usurped. By contrast, whatever the merits of their opinions, the religious leaders in the South do speak out and are at least heard. In the North- East, the pusillanimity of civil society has enabled the LTTE to erode all healthy social values, leaving the people at a total loss. The step taken by the religious leaders in Batticaloa must be commended for doing more than what anyone else was willing to do.

The LTTE has destroyed all notions of right and wrong, leaving the people with no grounds to resist even the most criminal of demands. This is clearly seen in the ongoing recruitment around Batticaloa.

4. The People : Denuded and Disowned

Some common reactions by parents to demands made by the LTTE to sign off their children, have exhibited the nakedness of the people in starkly tragic terms. Seldom is their first resort to point to the wrong, inhumanity and abhorrence of the demand.

In a futile move to protect their own children, they start clamouring, "How about your village headman, has he given his son? Why are you doing this only to us rural folk? Why not to the families in Batticaloa town? How about the families in Jaffna and elsewhere in the North?" It is politics that thrives by feeding on envy, revenge, and on the desire to teach those who escape a lesson.

This ruinous state of affairs is sustained by two things. One is the elimination of sane and moral voices from within the society who dared to dissent. Second, this elimination reinforced conditions where the leaders of society became inert. They failed to condemn inhuman demands made on the people, and to stand by them firmly in the assertion of their rights.

Take the mission of the religious leaders above. Reading between the lines, Bishop Swampillai is no less skeptical of the LTTE and its methods than any sensible man would be. But after the mission nothing changed. The Tamil press tamely reported Karikalan’s vindication of the LTTE’s stand. Indeed, the religious leaders did not go to Karikalan on the basis of reports or rumours. They knew for certain through a stream of testimonies over eight weeks. But in their address to Karikalan, instead of demanding cessation and restoration, they spoke of ‘talk among people’, which Karikalan simply denied. The LTTE thus cornered the religious leaders, making it difficult for them to express their outrage publicly thereafter, and to give the people leadership in their hour of need.

The people, so disowned by those who should have stood by them, are condemned to creeping brutalisation. This particular instance involving the religious leaders is just a local reflection of what has come to be accepted wisdom in dealing with the LTTE. It has now the stamp of approval from the international community. Anyone in an organisation having dealings with the LTTE, would risk his career by confronting them.

The Veerakesari of 21st September carried an account of an ICRC press conference. The ICRC official said, with reference to allegations of forced recruitment in the Batticaloa District, that they had received no complaints. The Tamil press used this in such a manner as to support their cover-up of what the LTTE was doing. The people of Batticaloa were angry and felt that the ICRC could at least have remained silent.

The ICRC of course knew and was no doubt concerned. A slightly earlier confidential report by an international agency represented in the area spoke of LTTE recruitment of children in the interior of Batticaloa. It referred to reports of recruits below 11 years, but generally in the age group around 15. The interior was likened to a funeral house with relatives mourning the loss of a loved one.

Yet no international agency on the ground has so far raised the issue in public. The rationale is again one of dealing with the LTTE with extreme caution, trying not to give them cause for offence. In part, this approach has its roots in widespread skepticism about the Sri Lankan State and Sinhalese polity, and their proverbial inability to do anything constructive. This however leaves the cardinal question unanswered: What about the people? A large section of the peace lobby, prompted by articulate Tamils in their midst, has answered this question by asserting that the Tamil people have chosen to follow the LTTE. This complacent and self-serving answer becomes callouser and shallower by the day.

5. Back to the Sangam Age!

The methods of recruitment referred to clearly show, however, that the LTTE has no illusions about the support of the people for its project. Its propaganda leaders in the East have called upon the people to return to the glorious Sangam age- the classical age of Tamil literature, 1st - 2nd centuries AD. Attention is drawn prominently to a verse from the collection Puranaanooru that romanticises mothers taking pride in anointing their sons and sending them to win glory or honourable death in war. The crucial aspect is conveniently suppressed. The ancient bards of the Puranaanooru would have been outraged at their poetical licence being used to drag in women and children as soldiers.

It should be evident by now that the use of Tamil classics without context is double-edged. Ariyamalar (40) of Kiran is a mother whose young son was taken by the LTTE in late September. She became mentally disturbed and swore that she would deal with her tormentors who deprived her of a loved one in the same manner that Kannakai dealt with hers. Kannakai is the heroine of the Jain Tamil classic, The Anklet, by Illango Addikal. Kannaki’s husband Kovalan was wrongly charged with theft and executed by the king of Madurai. So strong was the force of chastity in the injured woman that it set Madurai aflame, and its king with it.

By the end of September, the LTTE was angry and nonplussed by the hostility evoked around Batticaloa by its compulsory call to arms. Its attempts to pass off coercion as a spontaneous response had also failed. Instead, there was a brazenly open breach of its pledges to the UN on child recruitment. Earlier it was a question of whether the ‘voluntariness’ in a child becoming a soldier could be morally accepted. Although the answer was a resounding no, many adult members of the Tamil elite blurred the issue by praising the courage and patriotic fervour of children of the lower orders bearing arms. But what is going on around Batticaloa posses even graver questions. The parents are being coerced to sign off their children in a travesty of legality. It is even more a question of child slavery of a lethal kind.
(To be continued)