INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN’S DAY: HOW THE LTTE LOVED CHILDREN TO DEATH!

By Rudrakumaran Parthipan

Tamil children abducted and turned into child soldiers and their years and lives stolen from them. Whatever reason the LTTE may have had to take up arms, why did they kidnap children and turn them into killers? It’s now over 10 years since the LTTE was defeated militarily. Given that the political wings of the LTTE remain very much alive, why are they not asked to account for the fate of these children. Why is no one counting the Tamil children killed by LTTE?

Were LTTE’s child soldiers, TAMIL CHILDREN?

Were these Tamil children taken by force – only in North and East of Sri Lanka?

Who knows how many children LTTE abducted since the 1980s? How many are alive today?

Who knows how many of these children survived the LTTE’s gruesome training or how many children were shot dead trying to flee the LTTE’s training camps/ Who are these dead children? Where are their parents? Why don’t they annually mourn the dead children and remind the pro-LTTE sections of Sri Lankan expatriates of what happened to them?

Why did the UN not do anything about stopping LTTE child soldier recruitment other than writing reports? Most NGOs were operating in the North and these foreign staff were located in offices next to LTTE offices. They were witnesses to child soldier recruitment. Why didn’t they talk about this gruesome phenomenon?

We are talking about children as young as  seven years, kidnapped from their parents, scared, lonely and denied the love of family and home and given a gun to kill.

Mind you, photos of Prabakaran’s son show him playing with toys and swimming with daddy Prabakaran, while children the same age as his son had only a gun for a toy. Was this the Eelam that Tamils were being promised?

These children could have become Accountants, Teachers, Doctors, Engineers, they could have gone far if they did not have their youth stolen. Their parents must be with a heavy heart remembering how their children was stolen and turned into killers. Some Tamil homes had multiple children taken from them. How must they be feeling today? LTTErs commit suicide and then they celebrate these suicides as acts of heroism but what about the Tamil children who faced death just because they were sent to the frontlines of battle?

This needs to be repeated again and again:
The LTTE stole the youth of thousands of Tamil children. Why aren’t LTTE held accountable for this tragedy?
Rather than always finding faults with others, Tamils must ask the pro-LTTE operatives outside and within Sri Lanka to account for the many Tamil children whose youth was stolen by LTTE. 

These Tamil child soldiers had their parents’ love stolen from them
These Tamil child soldiers had their education stolen from them
These Tamil child soldiers had their teenage years stolen from them
These Tamil child soldiers could not enjoy life as a child
These unfortunate Tamil child soldiers had the entire gamut of children’s rights stolen

Isn’t it time that those who bat for the LTTE and defend that terrorist organization are held accountable for these the crimes of approval, collusion and silence?

This International Children’s Day we dedicate to all of these innocent Tamil Children whom LTTE kidnapped from their parents and turned into Child Soldier Killers.

International Children’s Day must not forget the suffering these Tamil children had to endure not only trained to kill but even trained to commit suicide by biting a cyanide capsule. Adele Balasingham who trained these Tamil children from 1970s to 1990s is happily living in the UK. Why do the human rights champions not charge her for her crime of robbing the innocence of children by training them to kill and teaching them to commit suicide too?

These are not hard questions to answer and yet we don’t hear one murmur from those who talk loudly about human rights violations. This tells a lot about their integrity and of course their collusion with terrorists and terrorism.

Original post: https://srilankabriefly.org/international-childrens-day-and-the-ltte-loved-children-to-death/