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by Tharuka Dissanaike

A week ago, 49 ex-combatant children, in their early teens were 'recuperating' in an international donor-funded center in the Vanni.

Going by the stories put out by the press who visited the center as it was ceremonially opened, the children will learn to play badminton, read comics, receive some counselling and get used to the feel of school books again before they are sent back home, back to their parents and siblings. The few weeks of 'demilitarisation' is important, UNICEF says, so that the children will become used to life away from LTTE training camps before returning to their homes and kin.

But not even four days afterwards, in an unfortunate coincidence (surely it was not a deliberate affront on the donors) the LTTE recruited almost half that number of children from the Eastern coastal belt, near Batticaloa. Parents protested. The LTTE was forced to put up a press conference to show that the children (this time, mid-teens) were not forcibly taken but had voluntarily joined the ranks.

This does not, however, excuse the fact that they are children (technically under 18 and should be in school). The LTTE has a habit of barging into North/East schools, even ones in the Government areas, preaching their propaganda and lobbying for recruits. This may not be seen as forcible conscription, but the fact is, nobody has tried to stop it, not Principals, nor the education administration of the area. For many young students, joining the LTTE may appear to be a better career option than the hopeless road they see winding into their future.

For twenty years, the LTTE's child conscripts, forcible or otherwise, were taken from areas under their military and civil control. But since the ceasefire, other doors were opened for conscription. The LTTE used all possible avenues.

Demanding a child per Tamil family, forcibly kidnapping others, lobbying at schools and forcible recruitment at schools. The Government-maintained administration was seen to be mutely standing aside while the LTTE ran rampage in schools of the area, instigating students to protest, threatening principals, showing violent war videos in schools and holding moving speeches and recruitment drives while school sessions were on. Hapless parents had little support from law enforcement (the police were of the opinion that this was beyond their scope of duty), from schools or from the international community.

The Eastern towns were particularly plagued by LTTE's single-mindedness pursuit of adding numbers to their ranks.

After two years of protracted negotiation, the UNICEF and Save the Children of UK managed to put together the Killinochchi transit center. By this time however, the LTTE had added 1155 (plus an unverified 25 more) new child recruits to their ranks.

How long is it going to take to let all these children go? If the LTTE is dedicated to the Rs. 100 million project of rehabilitating child soldiers, why on earth do they persist in adding fresh numbers to the child brigade.

This single issue may present one of the toughest decisions of a possible peace. Will the child soldiers ever find their way to a normal family life again? What is LTTE's motive in denying publicly that they recruit and doing so openly, making mockery of the efforts of the World Bank, the UN, the truce monitors and countless other intermediaries?

There is no exonerating the LTTE from this crime of forcing children to fight in a war that was never their choice. I remember once meeting a 14-year-old combatant who had never seen a Sinhala person before and felt threatened when a senior Tamil refugee shared a joke with us in almost-forgotten Sinhalese. So much so that he called the man, old enough to be his grandfather, aside and warned him. It is difficult to see how militarized children will learn to live normal lives, even as recruitment continues.

Looking at the ground situation in many of the high-recruitment areas, one can feel the sense of hopelessness that must envelope these youth schools without class rooms, teachers, desks, the lack of higher education opportunity, the lack of employment prospects, parents poverty etc. Too many of them come to school without meals and have to toil for family income after classes. Maybe many of them look at joining the LTTE as an outlet to the endless cycle of poverty and the total negligence of the state.

The ceasefire has not brought about enough positive change to many areas of the North and East. Except for the high-profile building of the A 9 highway, the North and East still lay in a stupor of neglect bad roads, lack of electricity, housing for refugees and above all, lack of work and income.

These ground realities have to be addressed before we can be assured that these children's return home is not merely a temporary break from the LTTE. The children must return to families that can afford to feed them, go back to schools that can teach them and look forward to a future with proper avenues for gainful employment.

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