SRI LANKA-CHILDREN: Child Warriors In a Lingering War

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Oct 7 1997 (IPS) - A large majority of armed members of the Tiger guerrillas are children, either forcibly recruited or coerced into joining one of the deadliest guerrilla outfits in the world.

The rebels seeking to carve out a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka through a bloody 14-year conflict are silent about hiring youngsters or deny the existence of children in their ranks.

Privately though they confess to roping in children but argue that they don’t have a choice here for “when more and more adults die and there are no more to be recruited, what do we do? We are fighting a liberation struggle, you know,” one rebel told an aid worker.

UNICEF workers in Colombo also concede it is impossible to impos役ͽ¹ÑíÕË)Ñ͹½Ñà±ò¥à±ò¹ÑÑÑå๑¹½Ñ½ÖÖÑìÑà±±åÉòì½¥¹ÑÍò‘!½Ýìà¹å½ ÕѵÁ½ÍòÉÕ±òÍ๑Éò¥Õ±àÑѽ¹Í½¹à¹Ñ±±ò¥à±¥É½ÕÁàݽɡòÉÍàÑ‘’It is a terrible childhood to go through,” said a child activist who once, during a visit to the war-scarred north, saw young boys carrying guns, sitting nonchalantly and playing around. “They looked like kids playing with toy guns,” she said.

According to an interesting study done by a Sri Lankan paediatrics expert, most of the group of former 19 child soldiers interviewed had in fact volunteered for recruitment.

“An important reason given by seven of them was fear of abduction by the ‘enemy’. Others have joined for revenge, or for the thrill of being a freedom fighter, while three had joined for economic reasons,” said Prof Harendra de Silva in his study. He found that many had tried to run away at least once, or disobeyed orders, resulting in trivial or severe punishment, blackmail or death threats.

“Most were made to engage in heavy manual work, front-line fighting including killings and setting mines. A majority were trained in the use of firearms and methods of self destruction,” De Silva reported.

Analysts say children are generally drawn into Tamil Tiger ranks because their families are in a desperate situation. Reports show that psychologically the most vulnerable groups are women who have either lost their husbands or adult sons at the hands of the Sri Lankan army.

They are told by the rebels that their “underage” sons should carry on the struggle and revenge the dead father or brother. “The families are brainwashed into believing this is the best thing to do and in the absence of any other guidance, they allow their children to join the movement,” an aid worker said.

Boy recruits start as early as eight to 10 years while the girls join from around 10 years. They undergo the worst case of trauma, and sadly they lose their childhood. There can be no compensation for that, say aid workers.

The youngsters are put into uniforms, trained for a couple of months, handed weapons — which they could hardly carry — and told “now go out into the world and fight the enemy.” Some stories of irrational behaviour and trauma suffered by recruits are horrifying.

“R, a pleasant looking 15 year old boy came with complaints of insomnia, irrational talk, abnormal behaviour and aggressive outbursts towards camp mates. After a normal upbringing on a farm, R joined the movement at 11. He was given extensive training and taught that those who do not support the struggle are his enemies and should be killed,” says a Sri Lankan psychiatrist, who treated the boy.

In a report, he said “when starting active combat duty first the killings affected the boy but gradually he became obsessed by the need to see blood and got’pleasure from brutally killing people. After one attack where he lost many of his comrades, he was shown videos of killed women and children and told that his enemies had done this.”

The boy also recounted to the psychiatrist, who preferred to remain anonymous, how he killed inhabitants of a village in a subsequent attack. “He felt no remorse when he described how he held a child by his legs and bashed the head against the wall until the brain matter came out, of how he enjoyed the mother scream and how he hacked them to death. He said they deserved to die. He took part in four village massacres and felt bored and restless when inactive.”

The psychiatrist, who analysed in detail the trauma suffered by children and adults during torture by both government and rebel forces in his report on mental health, asked: “Wouldn’t it

be a positive step for all, if organisations doing humanitarian work at local and international levels could exert pressure on responsible parties for peace, to enable people to live in dignity?”

“After working in a war devastated area for over a decade and seeing the untold misery it causes, one begins to realise that nobody wins a war. There are only losers,” he wrote.

UNICEF, the U.N Child care agency, says it has charted out a course of action to support children affected by Sri Lanka’s armed conflict, in its country programme running from 1997 to 2001.

Last year, Grace Machel, the former first lady of Mozambique, prepared an extensive global study for the U.N on the use of children in armed conflict in 30 countries.

She urged, among many other recommendations, that the age of military recruitment be raised to 18 and wanted all child recruits, whether government or non-government, to be demobilised.

The U.N, concerned with the slow progress of implementation of Machel’s report, in August appointed a Special Representative to follow up on Machel’s report and crack down on recruitment of children in war zones. That’s easier said than done, particularly in Sri Lanka’s case, say aid workers.