Traumatic experiences of Tiger child soldiers
I’m only 16. They gave me a rifle. It was heavy. They said we had to
go forward. If we came back, they would shoot us’Tamil children as young
as 11 were forced at gunpoint to fight for the Tigers in Sri Lanka’s
civil war. Survivors talked of their ordeal to Gethin Chamberlain in
Ambepusse.
Darchiga Kuken was sheltering in a bunker in the Mullaitivu area when
a group of about 20 Tiger child soldiers arrived and demanded that she
went with them.
Front line
Darchiga Kuken, a former Tiger child soldier interned at the
Ambepusse rehabilitation centre after escaping from the rebels.
Picture by Gethin Chamberlain |
“I was sick with chicken pox. My mother and father were screaming and
crying, saying that I was sick and pleading with them not to take me,”
she said. The men went away. And then at 5 p.m. on March 14, they came
back. They called me to come out and then they grabbed me and put me in
a jeep. I started to cry. I was shouting: ‘Mother, father, help me.”
The 16-year-old is now being held in what the Government describes as
a ‘rehabilitation centre’, a jungle camp built on a hillside outside the
town of Ambepusse in the South of the country. Here children like her,
who were forced to fight on the front line in the final stages of the
war in Sri Lanka, gave the Observer compelling evidence of war crimes
committed by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
The camp currently houses 95 children, with another 200 on their way
from internment camps around the town of Vavuniya in the North of the
country.
LTTE suspects
Despite international concerns over the treatment of LTTE suspects,
the children appeared to be well treated and were able to speak freely
when the Observer visited the camp on Thursday. The most distressing
sight was a young boy howling in pain on the floor of one of the huts;
his friends said that he had recently arrived and still had a piece of
shrapnel lodged in his skull from the recent fighting.
The accounts of these boys and girls who surrendered to the Sri
Lankan Army were shocking. They say they were dragged screaming from
their families and sent into action with only a few days of basic
training. The older members of the LTTE warned them to keep firing and
advancing, or they would be shot by their own side from behind.
Those who did try to escape said they were fired on by their own
side.
Children who were recaptured had their hair shaved off to mark them
as deserters and boys were beaten.
LTTE cadres
Darchiga said she was shot in the stomach by the army two days after
arriving on the front line, having been forced to pick up a rifle and go
forward to fight. She said LTTE cadres left her bleeding for four hours
before she received any medical treatment.
According to her testimony, the Tigers had warned every family that
those children who could carry a weapon were expected to join up,
regardless of age. Some as young as 11 and 12 had been taken, she said.
“They told families that one child was enough. If they had five
children, they would take four and leave just one.”
She was taken to a training camp at Mullaivaikal, where nine days of
basic military training were interrupted by frequent air attacks. On the
morning of March 24, she was sent to the front.
Deserters
“I was scared and thought that I would die now and would never see my
parents again. They had scared us and said we shouldn’t sleep because
the army would come and cut our throats.”
She spent the first day hiding in a bunker, then she was pushed
forward because the senior Tiger cadres said they were running out of
fighters.
“They gave me a rifle. It was very heavy. They threatened us that we
had to go forward and shoot; if we came back, they would shoot us
themselves.
“I went a few hundred yards and hid behind a coconut tree. I saw the
army coming and I was very scared and I was lying down trying to hide,
but then they shot me in the stomach.
“I started screaming because of the pain, but the cadres told me to
shut up because the army would hear me. They gave me a cloth to put on
the wound. There was a lot of blood. It was four hours before they took
me to the hospital at Matalan.”
On April 13 she escaped and ran back to her family. The Tigers were
looking for deserters, she said. “If they caught them, they shaved their
hair off and sent them back to the front line.” Boys also received a
beating.
LTTE membership
She finally managed to escape with a group of civilians, but only
after the Tigers had fired on them. She was separated from her family,
who were sent to the internment camps at Vavuniya, and taken to a court,
which ordered her to be detained at Ambepusse for a year - the standard
treatment for those who confess to LTTE membership, even if they had
been coerced.
Ravindram Vajeevan, 17, said he arrived at Ambepusse on April 9 after
escaping from the Tigers four days earlier. He had a large scar on his
left arm where he had been shot by his former comrades as he ran away.
He had been taken from his family in Mullaitivu on March 29, as
fighting raged around the shrinking no-fire zone and LTTE numbers
dwindled. A large group of men arrived at the house, he said, and
dragged him from the bunker where he had been sheltering.
“They hit me and my mother was crying and I was crying, but they said
I had to go to fight. My neighbours tried to stop them, but they said
they would shoot. Then they fired in the air,” he said.
He was taken to a camp with about 70 other young boys and taught how
to make a bunker, how to handle a rifle, how to escape from an ambush
and how to stage an attack. They were told that if they did not fight
they would be shot from behind, he said. On the fifth day, he escaped.
Our parents
“In the beginning, the LTTE were fighting for the Tamils, but in the
end they were just fighting for themselves,” he said.
Thambirasa Jagadiswary, 20, and her brother Thambirasa Thisanandan,
17, were reunited at Ambepusse after the Tigers took them from their
family.
Jagadiswary was taken in June 2008 and drafted into a mortar unit
before being captured; her brother was dragooned in February this year.
He had spent 15 days with the rebels before escaping and surrendering.
Afterwards he was taken to Vavuniya with his parents. “They told us
there that those who were in the LTTE should register, so I did,” he
said. “Then they told me they would separate us from our parents.”
“I was talking with my friends when they brought him in,” his sister
said.
“All of a sudden I saw my brother and I started crying and shouting
and hugging him.” Their mother remains in the internment camp at Menik
Farm.
Human Rights
These teenagers’ revelations come days after the UN Human Rights
Council rejected a call for an investigation into allegations of war
crimes by both sides during the 26-year conflict and accepted an
alternative Sri Lankan Government resolution describing the conflict as
a “domestic matter that doesn’t warrant outside interference”. The Sri
Lankan military has also been accused of committing war crimes by firing
on civilians.
Among the traumatised and unwilling child soldiers of the Tigers,
there is just a desire for normality to return.
“I was one year with the LTTE and I must be one year here,” said
Jagadiswary. “Now I would just like to find my mother and get on with my
life.”
Observer, London |