10-02-2005, 03:15 AM
<b><span style='font-size:25pt;line-height:100%'>கருணா குழுவின் சதியா இது?</b>
இது விடுலைப்புலிகள் செய்ததாக தெரியவில்லை. தருணம் பார்த்து, விடுதலைப்புலிகள் குறைந்த வயது இளைஞர்களை பெற்றோரிடம் ஒப்படைத்த நேரம் பார்த்து, ஐரோப்பிய ஒன்றியம் பிணகியுள்ள நிலை பார்த்து, செய்த சதி போல தெரிகிறது.
</span>
Oct. 1, 2005. 08:19 AM
MARTIN REGG COHN PHOTOS/TORONTO STAR
Perinparaja Aravind, 15, escaped after the Tamil Tigers abducted him. His family is loath to let him return to school.
<img src='http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/051001_aravind_boy_250.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image'>
Tamil youth fall prey to Tiger rebel recruiters
MARTIN REGG COHN
ASIA BUREAU
BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka—Religious festivals are cherished by Tamils here, a time to worship traditional deities at the local temple with loved ones.
But holy days have become a time of hiding for Tamil youth wary of walking into a trap.
Hindu teenagers who want to pray have become prey for the notorious Tamil Tigers — guerrillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — who stalk worshippers at festival time. Sri Lanka's holy places are a hunting ground for the Tigers, who routinely abduct adolescent teenagers to bolster their army with child soldiers.
Now, after the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka and pushed Tamil refugees into camps, recruitment is rising again. The guerrillas can catch even students who try to lie low in this isolated east-coast town off guard.
Perinparaja Aravind, 15, was biking to an after-school tutorial when three men accosted him on a recent summer night. Under the pretext of seeking directions, they gagged and blindfolded him.
"Suddenly they covered my mouth with a drug-soaked cloth and I fell unconscious," the wide-eyed youth recalls, sitting nervously in a safe house where relatives are safeguarding him.
His hands were bound as he travelled for hours to a training camp where Tiger cadres tried beating him into submission. He still clutches the bloodied T-shirt he wore when they whipped him. And warned, "If you run away we'll come searching and shoot you."
Then they launched passionate appeals to him and two other adolescents to join the struggle for a Tamil state:
"They asked us to join Brother (Velupillai) Prabhakaran" — the leader of the LTTE who demands unquestioned loyalty from cadres, who wear cyanide capsules around their necks to commit suicide in case of capture.
Aravind managed to escape three days later, but he lives in fear of being found out. His family is loath to let him return to school.
"He is almost like a prisoner," frets his grandfather, Arumukhaswami Balasubramaniam, 74. "The Tamil Tigers, they are dangerous people."
The LTTE's reliance on children as frontline warriors in Sri Lanka's two-decade-old civil war has long been a stain on its international reputation. There were high hopes the guerrillas would change tactics in their fight for a separate state after a 2002 ceasefire with the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo. But old habits, like young soldiers, die hard.
"It hasn't stopped," complains Father Harry Miller, a Jesuit priest here who sits on the local ceasefire monitoring committee. "There were 18 cases over the last two weeks of child abductions," he says, pulling out a dossier laden with complaints filed by grieving parents.
The United Nations, human rights groups and foreign governments are alarmed by the resurgence in child abductions against a backdrop of escalating violence. Significantly, most of the abuses over the past three years have been committed by Tamils against Tamils — unlike the previous decades when Sinhalese soldiers from Sri Lanka's majority Buddhist community were blamed for human rights violations.
UNICEF's Sri Lanka offices reports that at least 440 children were recruited by the Tigers up until August of this year, part of a regular pattern that shows no signs of abating.
"July was a huge spike," says UNICEF spokesperson Geoffrey Keale, noting there were 134 cases, not counting the many that go unreported. Only 14 children were officially released by the Tigers that month.
"This has been part of their organizational framework for a long time," Keale says, pointing to UNICEF figures showing more than 5,000 children have been recruited since 2001, with fewer than 1,500 freed in that period.
The European Union issued a statement this week condemning the "continuing recruitment and retention of child soldier cadres by the LTTE," stressing there is "no excuse whatsoever for this abhorrent practice."
The EU warned it is "actively considering" a formal designation of the Tigers as a "terrorist organization," following the lead of the U.S. and Britain. Canada does not explicitly ban the LTTE under domestic anti-terrorism laws, instead adopting U.N. regulations that ban fundraising for the guerrillas.
When Prime Minister Paul Martin raised concerns about child recruitment with Tamil politicians on a visit to Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, last January, he was met with routine denials. Rights activists want foreign governments to take a tougher stand.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has expressed fears that the Tigers are replacing fighters who may have perished in the tsunami by recruiting child soldiers. In an 80-page report, the group described "sometimes brutal military training" and propaganda tactics that effectively brainwashed captive children.
Human Rights Watch appealed to members of the Tamil diaspora — including the majority of emigrés, who live in Toronto — to pressure the Tigers into conforming with the laws of war and international law banning use of underage soldiers, some as young as 12.
But many activists complain of a conspiracy of silence, both among international charities working in Sri Lanka that fear offending the Tigers, and members of the Tamil diaspora who fear retribution if they speak out.
"People won't talk," complains Miller, the Jesuit priest. A former rector of St. Michael's College in Batticaloa, he raised the issue with some Toronto-based alumni whom he once taught, but they didn't want to hear about it.
"We told them what the LTTE is doing to children back here, but they replied that we couldn't use that message — it was too delicate."
Nor has the outspoken Jesuit made much headway with the top Tiger leadership. In meetings with the head of the LTTE's political wing, S.P. Thamilchelvan, Miller says he was stonewalled. Despite the denials, he confronted Thamilchelvan with detailed complaints about abducted children.
Another Jesuit priest, Father Paul Satkunanayagam, has spent the past decade trying to heal the wounded psyches of child soldiers who escape from the Tigers or are cast off. With some initial funding from the Canadian International Development Agency, he opened a rehabilitation centre, Lilies of the Field, on the outskirts of town to help former fighters complete their primary schooling and learn vocational skills.
He laments the lack of co-operation from the LTTE, and the failure of UNICEF to hold the Tigers to account when they promised to stop using child soldiers. A planned transit centre near Batticaloa never opened because there were so few children released, and so it falls to him to help the children recover the humanity that is beaten out of them in Tiger training camps, the priest says.
Former child soldiers "need to be able to take responsibility for their own lives — there is an aggressiveness and lack of understanding of the rights of others, of interpersonal relations," he says.
Rehabilitating the former fighters remains a dangerous business. For all his successes in reforming them, he is unable to let them return to the community for fear they will be targeted for retribution or be recruited again.
"They can't even go out for two months of fieldwork."
His fears are well founded. Across Batticaloa, children worry they will suffer the same fate as Rathiseelan Saseelan, 14, who was abducted a few weeks ago in broad daylight on a local road while his uncle watched.
"He asked them for a drink of water, but he was taken away," laments his grandmother, Peethambaram Najarath, 65, sobbing outside her home.
Najarath has taken photos of the abducted boy to the Red Cross, and reported his case to local authorities. The boy's uncle travelled to a Tamil training camp to beg for his release, to no avail.
Now she fears the boy's cousin, Udayakumar Rathan, is also vulnerable. But the frightened 15-year-old vows not to suffer the same fate.
Faced with an abduction, "I would run away from them, even at the risk of losing my life, because I want to live with my parents," he says adamantly.
"They don't allow children like me to study. And they destroy our ambitions."
இது விடுலைப்புலிகள் செய்ததாக தெரியவில்லை. தருணம் பார்த்து, விடுதலைப்புலிகள் குறைந்த வயது இளைஞர்களை பெற்றோரிடம் ஒப்படைத்த நேரம் பார்த்து, ஐரோப்பிய ஒன்றியம் பிணகியுள்ள நிலை பார்த்து, செய்த சதி போல தெரிகிறது.
</span>
Oct. 1, 2005. 08:19 AM
MARTIN REGG COHN PHOTOS/TORONTO STAR
Perinparaja Aravind, 15, escaped after the Tamil Tigers abducted him. His family is loath to let him return to school.
<img src='http://www.thestar.com/images/thestar/img/051001_aravind_boy_250.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image'>
Tamil youth fall prey to Tiger rebel recruiters
MARTIN REGG COHN
ASIA BUREAU
BATTICALOA, Sri Lanka—Religious festivals are cherished by Tamils here, a time to worship traditional deities at the local temple with loved ones.
But holy days have become a time of hiding for Tamil youth wary of walking into a trap.
Hindu teenagers who want to pray have become prey for the notorious Tamil Tigers — guerrillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — who stalk worshippers at festival time. Sri Lanka's holy places are a hunting ground for the Tigers, who routinely abduct adolescent teenagers to bolster their army with child soldiers.
Now, after the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka and pushed Tamil refugees into camps, recruitment is rising again. The guerrillas can catch even students who try to lie low in this isolated east-coast town off guard.
Perinparaja Aravind, 15, was biking to an after-school tutorial when three men accosted him on a recent summer night. Under the pretext of seeking directions, they gagged and blindfolded him.
"Suddenly they covered my mouth with a drug-soaked cloth and I fell unconscious," the wide-eyed youth recalls, sitting nervously in a safe house where relatives are safeguarding him.
His hands were bound as he travelled for hours to a training camp where Tiger cadres tried beating him into submission. He still clutches the bloodied T-shirt he wore when they whipped him. And warned, "If you run away we'll come searching and shoot you."
Then they launched passionate appeals to him and two other adolescents to join the struggle for a Tamil state:
"They asked us to join Brother (Velupillai) Prabhakaran" — the leader of the LTTE who demands unquestioned loyalty from cadres, who wear cyanide capsules around their necks to commit suicide in case of capture.
Aravind managed to escape three days later, but he lives in fear of being found out. His family is loath to let him return to school.
"He is almost like a prisoner," frets his grandfather, Arumukhaswami Balasubramaniam, 74. "The Tamil Tigers, they are dangerous people."
The LTTE's reliance on children as frontline warriors in Sri Lanka's two-decade-old civil war has long been a stain on its international reputation. There were high hopes the guerrillas would change tactics in their fight for a separate state after a 2002 ceasefire with the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo. But old habits, like young soldiers, die hard.
"It hasn't stopped," complains Father Harry Miller, a Jesuit priest here who sits on the local ceasefire monitoring committee. "There were 18 cases over the last two weeks of child abductions," he says, pulling out a dossier laden with complaints filed by grieving parents.
The United Nations, human rights groups and foreign governments are alarmed by the resurgence in child abductions against a backdrop of escalating violence. Significantly, most of the abuses over the past three years have been committed by Tamils against Tamils — unlike the previous decades when Sinhalese soldiers from Sri Lanka's majority Buddhist community were blamed for human rights violations.
UNICEF's Sri Lanka offices reports that at least 440 children were recruited by the Tigers up until August of this year, part of a regular pattern that shows no signs of abating.
"July was a huge spike," says UNICEF spokesperson Geoffrey Keale, noting there were 134 cases, not counting the many that go unreported. Only 14 children were officially released by the Tigers that month.
"This has been part of their organizational framework for a long time," Keale says, pointing to UNICEF figures showing more than 5,000 children have been recruited since 2001, with fewer than 1,500 freed in that period.
The European Union issued a statement this week condemning the "continuing recruitment and retention of child soldier cadres by the LTTE," stressing there is "no excuse whatsoever for this abhorrent practice."
The EU warned it is "actively considering" a formal designation of the Tigers as a "terrorist organization," following the lead of the U.S. and Britain. Canada does not explicitly ban the LTTE under domestic anti-terrorism laws, instead adopting U.N. regulations that ban fundraising for the guerrillas.
When Prime Minister Paul Martin raised concerns about child recruitment with Tamil politicians on a visit to Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo, last January, he was met with routine denials. Rights activists want foreign governments to take a tougher stand.
New York-based Human Rights Watch has expressed fears that the Tigers are replacing fighters who may have perished in the tsunami by recruiting child soldiers. In an 80-page report, the group described "sometimes brutal military training" and propaganda tactics that effectively brainwashed captive children.
Human Rights Watch appealed to members of the Tamil diaspora — including the majority of emigrés, who live in Toronto — to pressure the Tigers into conforming with the laws of war and international law banning use of underage soldiers, some as young as 12.
But many activists complain of a conspiracy of silence, both among international charities working in Sri Lanka that fear offending the Tigers, and members of the Tamil diaspora who fear retribution if they speak out.
"People won't talk," complains Miller, the Jesuit priest. A former rector of St. Michael's College in Batticaloa, he raised the issue with some Toronto-based alumni whom he once taught, but they didn't want to hear about it.
"We told them what the LTTE is doing to children back here, but they replied that we couldn't use that message — it was too delicate."
Nor has the outspoken Jesuit made much headway with the top Tiger leadership. In meetings with the head of the LTTE's political wing, S.P. Thamilchelvan, Miller says he was stonewalled. Despite the denials, he confronted Thamilchelvan with detailed complaints about abducted children.
Another Jesuit priest, Father Paul Satkunanayagam, has spent the past decade trying to heal the wounded psyches of child soldiers who escape from the Tigers or are cast off. With some initial funding from the Canadian International Development Agency, he opened a rehabilitation centre, Lilies of the Field, on the outskirts of town to help former fighters complete their primary schooling and learn vocational skills.
He laments the lack of co-operation from the LTTE, and the failure of UNICEF to hold the Tigers to account when they promised to stop using child soldiers. A planned transit centre near Batticaloa never opened because there were so few children released, and so it falls to him to help the children recover the humanity that is beaten out of them in Tiger training camps, the priest says.
Former child soldiers "need to be able to take responsibility for their own lives — there is an aggressiveness and lack of understanding of the rights of others, of interpersonal relations," he says.
Rehabilitating the former fighters remains a dangerous business. For all his successes in reforming them, he is unable to let them return to the community for fear they will be targeted for retribution or be recruited again.
"They can't even go out for two months of fieldwork."
His fears are well founded. Across Batticaloa, children worry they will suffer the same fate as Rathiseelan Saseelan, 14, who was abducted a few weeks ago in broad daylight on a local road while his uncle watched.
"He asked them for a drink of water, but he was taken away," laments his grandmother, Peethambaram Najarath, 65, sobbing outside her home.
Najarath has taken photos of the abducted boy to the Red Cross, and reported his case to local authorities. The boy's uncle travelled to a Tamil training camp to beg for his release, to no avail.
Now she fears the boy's cousin, Udayakumar Rathan, is also vulnerable. But the frightened 15-year-old vows not to suffer the same fate.
Faced with an abduction, "I would run away from them, even at the risk of losing my life, because I want to live with my parents," he says adamantly.
"They don't allow children like me to study. And they destroy our ambitions."