FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Amuthavasagam Lourthamma is one of the 94 inmates at the state-run rehabilitation centre for LTTE child.soldiers who have either surrendered or been captured, which is located at Ambepussa, about 70 km on the Colombo-Kandy road,
There are 44 girls on the rolls here, and what is special about Lourthamma is that her brother, older by just a year, is also there for rehab. Abhiraj was grabbed by the Tigers when his sister fled the training camp after just two days. "That gun was too heavy for me. It hurt my shoulder when I fired," said the girl, recalling that ‘short-service commission’ in the LTTE child brigade at the peak of war in March 2009.
"I was in Class 9, and my father was a fisherman who took up odds jobs to make a living since the Navy had banned fishing. We lived at Konavil in Killinochchi district. The LTTE took me from home even as my mother was pleading I should be let off because I was puny and very young," Lourthamma said. After two days of tough training with guns and ground exercises, the girl was ready for the frontline on the third day.
"That night, when I overheard the woman leader of the training group say that I would be sent to the battle at the stroke of dawn, I slipped out of camp," the girl recalled. And when the Tigers came the following day looking for her, her mother hid her in the backyard. The search team picked up her brother instead and Abhiraj spent just one day in the training before he, too, fled.
"I fired five rounds with a T-56 at target practice. They were happy when I hit the board twice but I was terrified. When everyone else was asleep, I slipped out. I guessed they did not come after me as they were too involved in the fighting," said the boy.
The siblings are among the thousands of children consumed by the 30-year-war. "The LTTE continued to recruit and use children, despite repeated commitments not to do so. Children in the east of the country were forcibly recruited and used by the Karuna group, a breakaway group of the LTTE, with the complicity of, and in some instances actively working with, the security forces," said the "Child Soldiers Global Report 2008" of the UN-backed Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.
The document also spoke of the large-scale child casualties in the "indiscriminate use of claymore and pressure mines and other methods of killing" in the war — one has to just walk into any of the five IDP camps in Vavuniya to see the scores of young men and kids without legs. Nakulendran Nimal (24) is one of them -- at the Ananda Coomaraswamy camp. The young man from Nallur in Jaffna was anAL (Class 12) student when the Tigers took him from the Jaffna Central College in 2007.
"I was trained for 45 days in the use of arms, but I spent most of the time playing drums in the Tiger orchestra. With the cadres fast depleting, we too had to go to frontline during the final phase of war. Both my legs got blown off in artillery shelling. Please help me get a pair of artificial legs so I can take care of myself," pleaded Nimal.
Back at Ambepussa, one little one’s story sounds similar to the other’s, even their ultimate goals are almost identical. "I want to go home, perhaps resume school," said Vinayamoorthy Manohararaj (18), who had served in the LTTE for two years before being nabbed by the military and placed in the Ambepussa camp. "Yes," he replied, without hesitation when asked if he had killed in those two years as a child soldier.
There is also a "teacher" among the ex-Tigers in Ambepussa. Ms Darsini Arumainathan (28) of Paranthan in Kilinochchi helps the staff -- teaching the inmates tailoring and other crafts.
She had fought for the LTTE for two years before surrendering to the Army on November 11 last year, even as two other girls in her bunker opted to blow themselves up with a grenade.
"We have psychologists, psychiatrists, medical people and teachers in various vocational crafts to engage these child soldiers in the rehabilitation centres. The aim is that, at the end of the one-year programme, the young man or woman will shake away the trauma of having been a child soldier and return to the family to integrate well into the society," explained Mr Suhada Gamlath, secretary, justice department, who oversees the rehab programme from his Colombo office.
"There have been child soldiers who have never seen a school building nor experienced normal life. One of them boasted to me that he had killed 127 soldiers," he said. (Courtesy: Daily mirror)
