POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Finally, Peace Talks to Tackle Human Rights

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

NAKHON PATHOM, Thailand, Jan 9 (IPS) - The Tamil Tigers wound up the fourth round of Sri Lankan peace talks here by issuing an unequivocal guarantee to the Tamil mothers of the country's north and east - that their children are safe from the Tigers' claws.

The Tamil Tiger rebels are ''not recruiting'' children and will not do so in the future, Anton Balasingham, chief negotiator of the rebel movement, said Thursday at a press conference here soon after the four days of talks with his Colombo counterparts ended.

Velupillai Prabakharn, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the rebels are officially known, will underscore this pledge when he meets the U.N. special envoy on child soldiers Olara Otunnu in the coming months, Balasingham added.

''MrPrabakharan will meet him (Otunnu),'' Balasingham assured. ''We will make a pledge to the United Nations that child recruitment will never take place.''

Otunnu is due to visit Sri Lanka's war-ravaged northern and eastern provinces -- where the LTTE has been waging an almost two-decade war to carve out the separate state of Tamil Eelam - in late February or early March.

Otunnu's mission, his second after a May 1998 visit, is expected give weight to the move by the negotiators at the talks to incorporate human rights issues as a fundamental feature in their search for a peaceful resolution to the ethnic conflict that has killed over 64,000 people.

In addition, the next round talks to be held Feb. 7-10 in Thailand will have a renowned rights expert, former Amnesty International (AI) chief Ian Martin, to advise both parties on ways to shape a human rights agenda as part of Sri Lanka's peace process.

''He will talk to both parties and on that basis we will draw up a comprehensive programme on human rights,'' said Gamini Lakshman Peiris, the Sri Lankan government chief negotiator.

The groundwork for a rights agenda was laid during the just-ended talks - the first time that human rights was given such billing after regular appeals from Sri Lankan rights advocates for this issue to be taken up since the peace talks began at a Thai naval base in September last year.

''Human rights will constitute an important element of a Final Declaration,'' said a statement released by the Norwegian government, which is mediating in the peace process, at the end of the talks.

This shift on the rights issue comes at a time when the Tamil Tigers are being accused of continued conscription of Tamil children into their ranks even after they signed a ceasefire agreement with Colombo in February last year.

According to the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission, a team with representatives from Nordic countries to monitor the truce, there is evidence that the LTTE has conscripted over 300 children up to November last year.

That comes after guarantees given by the LTTE to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and Amnesty in mid-2002 that it would halt the conscription of youngsters.

Save the Children Norway, a child rights group, estimates that the LTTE could have anywhere between 2,000 to 4,000 child combatants.

Balasingham said otherwise, arguing that children who have joined various LTTE ''welfare centres'' to escape grinding poverty have been deemed ''abducted and recruited'' by the Tigers for combat.

Meantime, rights activists are asking the Sri Lankan government to abolish the island's prevention of terrorism act (PTA), under which thousands of Tamil civilians were arrested and tortured by the government security forces during the conflict.

However, Peiris said that the Colombo had no intention of repealing the act, although ''some matters connected to the PTA will be looked at as part of the discussions on human rights''.

In the same vein, Peiris put paid to those lobbying for the current peace process to back the creation of a truth and reconciliation commission along the lines of that established in post-apartheid South Africa to shed light on rights violations that has occurred before the current truce.

But negotiators on both sides have agreed to ask the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to look into the cases of hundreds of Tamil civilians who ''disappeared'' during the conflict and the fate of the government troops who went missing in action.

This round of talks also saw mention of the country's Muslim minority concerns for the first time - particularly the right of thousands of Muslims who were ordered out of their homes in the northern province in 1990 by the LTTE to return home.

The Muslims are Sri Lanka's second largest minority after the Tamils.

''The parties also agreed that a Muslim delegation will be invited to the peace talks at an appropriate time for deliberations on relevant substantive political issues,'' the Norwegian government's statement added.

These steps forward on the human rights front are in sharp contrast to the disagreement between Colombo and the LTTE over permitting Tamil civilians to return to their homes in an area occupied by government troops in Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna peninsula.

Although this issue did not force the breakdown of the talks, as some had expected, it remained unresolved. The LTTE refused to accept a proposal made by the Sri Lankan army to permit civilians to resettle on condition that the Tamil Tigers disarm.

The Tigers agreed to a government proposal to initiate civilian resettlement outside the disputed area, and to await a report from an international military expert to overcome this difficult issue.

''We are pleased with the amicable settlement reached,'' Balasingham said. ''They (the government) understand our plight.'' (END/IPS/AP/IP/HD/MMM/JS/03)