Has it never occurred to the international media or so-called international community or even UN/UNHRC Officials to question the silence of LTTE fronts to LTTE’s recruitment of Tamil children who were turned into child soldiers forming one third of LTTE’s ground force? How can LTTE fronts call for justice when hiding their own crime of creating child soldiers & sending them to their deaths? How can LTTE fronts who funded LTTE guns & watched child soldier recruitment have any moral authority to demand human rights or draft curriculum for bogus genocide week? How can LTTE fronts hide behind human rights rhetoric when for 30 years they encouraged Tamil children to be kidnapped & turned into child soldiers. They claim to fight for a separate state but don’t mind kidnapping their own people’s children & sending them to die. These were their own people’s children who were denied fundamental rights, plucked away from their homes & loved ones & taught to kill. Prabakaran is no more but LTTE fronts must answer for the Tamil children forced into war. Genocide of these Tamil children’s childhood should take international centre stage not a trumped up 40,000 figure for which no names, no skeletons, no police complaints, no birth certificates have been presented even 16 years after the conclusion of the conflict. These hypocrites in exile watched as LTTE kidnapped, trained their own children to kill & die while they happily sought asylum & sent their kids to foreign schools, universities & secured foreign jobs. Now their children are trained to continue the lies so the LTTE can continue their kitty.
LTTE fronts have taken great pains to open websites, hold conferences, panel discussions, woo international media, make documentaries, hold campaigns/fundraises, lobby politicians & retain lawyers – there’s nothing they have not done since end of LTTE ground force in 2009. They have presented themselves as paragons of virtue, fighting for their people & their rights and begging the people of the world to listen to their grievance. Arguments lined up to fit into their goal for a separate state.
Let’s stop there.
Did these paragons of virtue living in foreign shores not feel an iota of sorrow to watch their own people’s children plucked away from their parents, from schools or orphanages or while returning home & dumped into LTTE camps to be trained to kill? Obviously not.
What kind of a separate state is envisaged when one third or an entire generation of Tamil children have been denied their childhood?
Did these paragons of virtue not count the number of children some as young as 7 years as per Human Rights Watch reports, undergo gruesome training those who fled were shot dead by LTTE?
Why did LTTE fronts — many based in safe, democratic countries — not campaign against this grave war crime committed by the LTTE against their own community’s children? Because they were complicit & were well aware of the recruitment.
What a crying shame to live overseas, have one’s own children educated in Western schools while one’s own people in rural areas were handed rifles
Why has author Harrison who has been counting the dead since 2009, not bothered to count how many Tamil children were kidnapped from 1980s by LTTE – how many died as a result of LTTE training, how many Tamil children were shot dead by LTTE trying to flee? How many Tamil children were raped or served as sexual toys for LTTE men in bunkers?
The conspicuous silence of the UN Agencies is to also be questioned.
LTTE violated Article 38(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child & Optional Protocol on the involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2000) which prohibits recruitment of children under 18?
What did UN do to stop LTTE over 30 years of child soldier recruitment?
According to the Paris Principles & Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Groups, forcible recruitment of children not only violated humanitarian law but was considered a form of slavery under international law.
In over 30 years of recruitment of Tamil children, did the UN & associated agencies do anything to stop LTTE’s child soldier recruitment other than compile beautifully printed reports?
Why did diaspora leaders not rescue even one Tamil child soldier?
Why did Tamil political parties & Tamil politicians talking big in Parliament also not rescue one Tamil child soldier?
Yet LTTE Diaspora & Tamil politicians are happy to parrot “genocide” ignoring their own community’s sin & betrayal of their own children.
A generation of children lost their childhood to satisfy an ideological dream of a handful.
How can LTTE Diaspora justify lobbying under banner of “human rights” while conveniently ignoring the first & most sacred right – the Right of a Child to live free from war & forced combat.
The “genocide” claim is nothing but a hyped charge sans facts or evidence only pumped by propaganda & sensationalism.
The genocide of the Tamil child used as child labor, for suicide, for ethnic cleansing, for assassinations, for killings is a bigger crime that has not received the international attention it should.
Under UN Security Council Resolution 1612 (2005) parties recruiting or using child soldiers must be held accountable.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 8) lists recruitment of children under 15 as a war crime.
Why was nothing done against LTTE?
The UN Basic Principles & Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy (2005) applies to all victims of human rights violations – not just those on one side of a conflict. Where is the justice for LTTE’s child soldiers denied childhood as well as the children LTTE killed from other communities including foreign children?
UK Govt stands guilty of harboring the woman who trained Tamil children as child soldiers. Why has no legal action been taken against Aunty Adele? Why is the aunty behind the cyanide capsule still free?
Optional Protocol to the CRC on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2000)
Article 4(1): Armed groups should not recruit or use children under 18 in any hostilities.
Article 6: States must take legal measures against those who violate the Protocol.
Why has the UK not prosecuted Adele Balasingham under this Protocol, which it ratified?
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
Article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) – Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 into armed forces or groups, or using them to participate actively in hostilities = War Crime.
Adele Balasingham trained child soldiers under 15 — and wrote about it. Why no ICC case?
UN Security Council Resolutions on Children in Armed Conflict
UNSC Resolution 1612 (2005) – Calls for accountability for persistent violators of children’s rights in armed conflict.
The LTTE was listed. Adele Balasingham was its face for child recruitment. Why is she not on any sanctions list?
To the UN & Human Rights NGOs:
Why have international investigators failed to name Adele Balasingham, despite her public role in training child soldiers and glorifying their deaths in books?
How is justice credible if those who armed and trained children — not just used them — face no international consequences?
Why has there been no tribunal, arrest warrant, or even public inquiry into her actions, while she freely publishes and lectures abroad?
Denying a child their childhood is a tragedy & a crime against humanity, a theft of their innocence that no separatist cause can justify.
Turning children into soldiers is a genocide of their childhood. Recruiting children as soldiers is illegal & is a systematic destruction of their childhood, a soul lost forever, a genocide that cannot be ignored. No cause, no ideology, justifies turning a child into a killer.
LTTE fronts accuse the Sinhalese of discrimination. But it was not the Sinhalese who robbed Tamil children of their childhood. It was the LTTE who turned their own sons & daughters into weapons. It was the Sinhala soldier who ensured that from May 2009, not a single Tamil child was kidnapped or recruited & trained to kill.
The LTTE fronts who cry “discrimination” are reminded that it was they who forced Tamil children to carry rifles instead of books – not the Sinhalese.
Tamil children were denied schooling by LTTE & LTTE Diaspora not the Sinhalese.
It was LTTE & its Diaspora cheer squads who took the childhood away from Tamil children.
It was the Sri Lankan Army who gave the Tamil child soldier a second chance at life.
If the Sinhalese are accused of injustice & discrimination what do you call those who train their own children to die killing?
The hypocrisy is that those who parrot “genocide” were the ones who were happy to force their own children to wear suicide vests & cyanide capsules.
This same LTTE Diaspora made a huge ruckus over the deaths of Prabakaran’s children but not a hum for the thousands of Tamil children who were turned into killers by them.
The international media, the so-called international community & the mighty officials of the UN & associated agencies kindly advised to revisit Sri Lanka’s conflict & ask themselves where the real discrimination lay? Was it not in turning innocent Tamil children into child soldiers? Was this genocide of the childhood not a bigger war crime for not only was these Tamil children’s childhood stolen from them, they were forced to kill & taught to commit suicide.
What have the international media/international community/UN done to cover this by questioning the LTTE fronts & Tamil politicians & Political Parties for their role?
Shenali D Waduge