The University Teachers for Human Rights, Jaffna (UTHR-Jaffna) - I, Sri Lanka. Information Bulletin No. 27.

Continued from yesterday

The LTTE distributed a pamphlet in Valaichenai in early October. This time there was no attempt at formal concealment. It was signed with the LTTE emblem and the slogan, ‘The thirst of the Tigers is for their motherland of Tamil Eelam’. It called upon the parents to contribute a child and expedite the birth of Tamil Eelam in Prabhakaran’s lifetime, by getting rid of the ‘Sinhalese Army’. Giving some idea of their target figure, the pamphlet observed that getting rid of the 3000 to 5000 strong army contingent in the Batticaloa District would be an easy task.

The pamphlet went on: "You parents of Valaichenai, ponder a little. The parents of Batticaloa are re-enacting the Puranaanooru. In spite of all the difficulties they are voluntarily binding a child to the LTTE to achieve victory in the liberation struggle. We soon expect the people of Valaichenai to follow their example"

With sly sarcasm it told the parents: "We are therefore determined to call on you and speak to you directly in your home." Addressing the youth, it said: " Young men and maidens of Valaichenai, rise and come to us, one from each home, to liberate the soil of Batticaloa from the enemy."

The message was, in short, send us a child or we will come and help ourselves. As one might guess from the leaflet and as is increasingly evident in practice, no age criterion is being observed. We may also observe the shifts of meaning in the LTTE’s declarations to different categories of persons. It has consistently told rural folk, as implicit in the leaflet above, that it will persist in a fight for a separate state, whatever the cost. It cannot be otherwise, for it has continually killed those who differ and intimated those who tried to start a peace movement whenever the LTTE apparently agreed to negotiate. To this rural constituency, any pronouncements on the Government’s willingness or unwillingness to negotiate, will be superfluous and even confusing.

It is to the middle class constituency that propaganda about the Government’s supposed obduracy, and unwillingness to negotiate an equitable political arrangement, is addressed. The Tamil media in Colombo carry out this task faithfully. It supplies the urban middle classes with justification for turning a blind eye to criminal impositions on rural folk and the continuing decimation of the community, while at the same time treating the LTTE’s military feats with children as sporting news. Just observe how Karikalan’s simplistic assertion of the Government’s unwillingness to negotiate, closed the discussion of an important question - that of child soldiers - taken up by the delegation of religious leaders from Batticaloa.

We need to be clear that we are dealing with very young, unwilling children of unwilling parents being coerced into arms by a desperate and unscrupulous organisation.

6. Child Soldiers and Serial Disasters

Given the nature of current recruitment, it is useful to look back at the situation in June 1990, which Bishop Swampillai cautioned against. A large number of very young children were joining the LTTE in early 1990 for very different reasons. The Indian Army was leaving and the UNP government of President Premadasa was pampering the LTTE with money and new vehicles. Many children, especially from impoverished homes, ran away and joined the LTTE. To them, sporting a gun and uniform grown-up-like and joining the carnival, where coca cola flowed freely, seemed irresistible. But the LTTE was very clear about renewing the war.

Behind the carnival atmosphere, the LTTE was saturating these children with war rhetoric. They were repeatedly harangued on Tamil Eelam being the only solution and the sacred duty of eliminating ‘traitors’ who disagreed. The LTTE’s cordiality with Premadasa and its constant professions of good faith became increasingly incompatible with the highly charged atmosphere it had fomented within. It could not hold down the lid much longer. Even those close to the LTTE were surprised that it resumed hostilities so early in June 1990.

Karikalan’s contention that they were then unprepared in very misleading. They were preparing themselves methodically with a series of provocations intended to invite severe reprisals against Tamil civilians. These provocations were made the more vexatious by their total unexpectedness. They included the murder of hundreds of surrendered Sinhalese and Muslim policemen and massacres of Muslim civilians living in close proximity to the Tamils (see our reports of that period). The LTTE then vanished into the jungles, taking frightened boys and girls along, leaving the Tamil civilians in the East exposed to the fury of the Army, STF and the newly formed Muslim Homeguards.

To bind the children who may have second thoughts, the LTTE charged them with hate against especially the Muslims, and gave meaning to their membership as a vehicle of vengeance. They were then made to participate in massacres. We saw then a terrifying march of serial disasters.

That was 1990. Eleven years on, the people have learnt a great deal more about the LTTE the hard way. They have no illusions. For today’s coerced recruits there is no semblance of a carnival. The only certainty is death or disablement. The LTTE has nothing to show for its rhetoric and repeated declarations of ‘final battle’ except serial disasters. These include a decimated population, widows, crippled children, repeated displacement, shifting frontiers and a land treacherously strewn with mines. And the LTTE is fated to go on in the same manner, to the end.

Today the mood among the recruits is far more difficult to handle than in 1990. They feel cheated, humiliated and resentful. They are angry at the way their parents were treated. The LTTE has added to its problems by inaugurating this special technique of recruitment in rural Batticaloa. Faced with local resentment, the LTTE has made rash pledges. It has praised the people of Batticaloa for upholding Puranaanooru traditions and added that they have been the torchbearers for all other districts, which will now follow them. They have promised that the same methods would be applied to Batticaloa town, the Vanni and even to Jaffna. The LTTE will be forced to try, if only to placate its Eastern conscripts, and then get into enormous problems.

Consequently, the LTTE will have even less control over events. It is already in flagrant breach of its pledge to the UN on child recruitment. Any further pledges it makes will be governed only by momentary expediency. One of its first priorities would be to bind the recruits and turn civilian resentment away from itself. It is here that the 1990 experience becomes relevant.

The LTTE’s vein of politics, abetted by the TULF, has in Batticaloa been steadily building Tamil resentment against the local Muslims. The Muslims are today feeling very anxious and insecure. In recent times the LTTE has squeezed the Muslims for money while avoiding overt violence. The LTTE’s new compulsions make the situation explosive, particularly in view of Karikalan’s reputation. The LTTE’s compulsions must be set against its apparently contradictory support for the UNP and attempts to manipulate December’s parliamentary elections. Coupled with the forced mass recruitment of resentful children, there is an explosive build-up that heightens the prospect of another round of serial disasters.

7. The Crucial Challenge

What was always inherent, and in many ways inevitable, is now taking shape before our eyes as a whirlwind. It must spend itself out, leaving wrecked humanity in its wake. The Government appears too preoccupied to take notice and the UNP is not thinking beyond December’s elections. The community leaders in Batticaloa, alarmed as they are, are looking for someone else to deal with it. The leading Tamil party, the TULF, has played itself out into destructive irrelevance. It is now incapable of addressing the realities facing the people. It is fated as it were, to serenade the siren that draws, inexorably, the ship of the Tamil Nation to its doom.

The Tamil leadership and civil society as a whole have lost the ability to tell the people that turning their children into soldiers and torturers is criminal and, moreover, to force parents to sign off their children into such a fate is doubly criminal. No parent has the right to do it.

Sri Lanka can boast of a wide-ranging international presence performing a variety of humanitarian services. They do this amidst attempts by the warring parties to bully and nudge them. At one level there is much that is similar between any two sides at war. But then, it is important to ask if there has been an error of judgement after all these years of sheer repetitiveness :- viz. Cease-fire, Talks, Intensification of child recruitment by the LTTE, War resumes, Civilians killed, Frontiers change, International agencies pull out of vulnerable areas and civilians follow, New minefields, International agencies move back to assess damage and make funding proposals for humanitarian assistance, New attempts at cease-fire, Life goes on.

The priority of the international agencies appears to be to somehow maintain contact with the LTTE and avoid confrontation, so that, technically at least, their work can go on. Given stark choices by the LTTE, they are bound to compromise. One sees something of the ground rules of the game where it has become almost impossible to confront the LTTE and hold it to account. The agencies are confronted with the dilemmas of doing humanitarian work among civilians, whom the LTTE has no qualms about using as dispensable pawns in a military game. In turn the people are equally helpless when bombed from the air by an irate state.

‘Peace’ has become the magic word to bridge the contradictions of this impossible state of affairs. As a corollary, ‘Human Rights’ has become an inexpedient expression because it gives offence to the LTTE. We gave some indication earlier on how the ‘Peace’ game is being played. It is finally the LTTE that decides the agenda and the LTTE has never made the slightest substantive concession to anyone. This is why the future of the LTTE’s child recruits looks utterly hopeless.

For example, one wishes the ICRC could say, after 12 years in Sri Lanka, that their instructors have made some impact on the LTTE leadership, particularly on observing the humanitarian law. But take Karikalan’s blood-curdling prospect held out to members of other groups who would fall into their hands upon the ‘liberation of Batticaloa’.

This was not a perfunctory remark. It was a frank statement made to a group of leading moral authorities in Batticaloa. The LTTE has right along maintained that all Tamils who opposed them are less than vermin. No quarter was ever acknowledged or given, even to those who advocated perfectly decent alternatives to the LTTE’s agenda of collective suicide. If all attempts to make an impact on the LTTE as regards the humanitarian law and child soldiers have failed dismally, it is because a malignant approach to these issues is part and parcel of its politics.

When the ordinary Tamil people speak with their feet, by running towards army lines, it is a damningly eloquent indictment of the LTTE’s politics. The moral judgements we sought to avoid are being forced on us. By playing down issues of right and wrong as the price for dealing with the LTTE, we have found the contradictions becoming increasingly bizarre. The accepted wisdom of dealing with the LTTE, by avoiding even the very basic moral questions, is irrevocably in crisis.

We must therefore restore the values of right and wrong and of Crimes Against Humanity in this discussion. We are on a firm footing only when we make demands on the grounds of what is right. We are dealing with a tendency where the brutality stems not primarily from those like Karikalan, but from an articulate section in the globalised upper reaches of Tamil society. Their callousness is such that they are determined to prove a point at any cost to their people. Their key success has been their facility to confuse the world about the true nature of the LTTE phenomenon.

The time to be confused is long past. We pointed out that a phenomenon founded on child soldiers is not only an evil in itself, but moreover, the resulting climate, by its very unpredictability, is pregnant of a devastating chain of evils. Whatever the peace community would wish, the whirlwind must blow itself out.

The LTTE’s current round of child recruitment must be challenged, stating frankly what it means and portends. What we say, and also do, must leave no room for confusion. The LTTE, as Amnesty International has already demanded, must not just stop child recruitment, but must further release all those taken. Not only the children, but also the young women and farmers abducted from the streets and their homes.

There can be no neutrality in the face of such a 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.

If all efforts fail, and these children are forced into battle formations, means must be found to help them escape and surrender rather than get blown up into smithereens. There can be no great credit to a government in blowing up its own children.

Given the present political uncertainties in the country, the International Community faces a crucial challenge. They must prepare for deadly outcomes affecting Tamil children and take all preventive measures possible.

(Concluded)