KILLINOCHCHI (Sri Lanka): The ground is parched. The sun is hot. It is around 2.00 in the afternoon. In a playground adjoining an orphanage run by the LTTE in its de facto state of north eastern Killinochchi, nearly 50 children, mostly girls, are ‘exercising’. They move their limbs as though in rote but there is no room for lethargy. There is a young woman, one of the matrons of the orphanage, wielding an ominous looking twig, who keeps a brisk momentum. The youngest seems to be little more than a toddler and tumbles to the ground several times. Several of the older ones too tumble and has the twig slashed against them. The exercises go on. This is a recollection of a recent visit, about six months back to the LTTE-controlled region (where journalists are not welcome species). Children in the LTTE-controlled districts have little time to play. Or study. Instead they line up for what is euphemistically called ‘exercises’ and are watched by hawk eyed ‘supervisors’.

Plagued by poverty the best that most children in the area, who are either war orphans or living malnourished, lived with below the poverty line parents, could hope for is to end up with three square meals a day. And the only way to get this sufficiently in an area where work opportunity seems nil is to join the LTTE. And most do this from the very childhood.

The LTTE, notorious for its use of children in combat, stands accused of continuing to recruit minors for military training despite the past three and a half years of the ceasefire, according to latest reports from the National Child Protection Authority (NCPA).

A report launched recently by the NCPA state that 5,081 children (2,975 boys and 2106 girls) had been recruited by the Tamil Tigers for military training from the date of the truce, Feb 22 up to the end of July 2005. Although the report says that the LTTE had returned 1,480 children back to their parents, NCPA sources say the menace of children being recruited as child soldiers continues unabated. “Society regards perpetrators of child rights violations such as sexual abuse and child labour without any mercy or sympathy. However, in the case of child recruitment, the tolerance level seems to be much high, mainly because of fear of the Tigers,” a senior NCPA official said.

A key reason that allows the LTTE a free hand in the use of children in war is the fact that the rebels have ended up being guardians of thousands of children orphaned by the 20-year-old war between the government and rebels. The LTTE theoretician Anton Balasingham who ended up answering most of the questions put to the LTTE leader Prabhakaran in the famous rebel press conference in April 2002, was seen angrily dismissing the question of child recruits with the bland statement that the LTTE ‘looks after hundreds of orphans’.

The question was not repeated at that press conference by any other journalist because of the fears of reprisal. But this statement of Balasingham clearly revealed why it was easy for the LTTE to have complete control over the children in its territory. “Policies to stop recruitment must be incorporated into all peace processes, peace agreements, and post-conflict recovery, which is seriously lacking in Sri Lanka”, child rights officials say adding that this is a major flaw in the truce signed between the government and the LTTE.

“The LTTE’s psychological expertise in breeding bloodthirstiness for war among youth is not easily penetrated. It is a menace which the international community can do little to combat as even the foreign truce monitors are barred from entering some areas under the LTTE control,” explains a human rights activist in northern Jaffna where the LTTE is reported to have recruited over 700 children as militants in the past three years. She relates an incident concerning a woman who had been a former LTTE cadre, during the early 1980’s when the LTTE began expanding the organization.

After a few years of being with the LTTE the woman, who was then a little more than a child and had been a war orphan, fled the Tiger camp with difficulty. Managing (apparently quite miraculously) to escape from the punishment meted out to those who flee the organization, she sought refuge in government military-controlled Jaffna with the help of some NGO activists in the region.

Recently the woman who had settled down into family life had been appalled to find that her teenaged daughter had one day, instead of going to school, travelled from Jaffna to the LTTE-controlled region, to join the Tamil Tiger militants, willingly.

“What took place next was a drama. The woman appealed for our help and we supported her in locating her daughter and brought her back which involved a long process. By this time the daughter too had had a taste of what it was like in the LTTE camps”, says the human rights activist. The fact that LTTE supporters are in charge of north eastern university student movements (located in government controlled areas) and wield heavy influence over student bodies make the Tiger recruitment easier, child rights activists point out.

The defection of the organization last year by the LTTE militant Karuna is also cited as one more reason that has added to the plight of children in the east, especially in eastern Batticaloa where the renegade militant faction is said to operate from the jungles. “Abductions are rampant in Batticaloa. Here it could be both the militant factions. The situation is clearly worsened after war was declared between Karuna and Prabhakaran,” a human rights source in Batticaloa said.