Probe ‘Pudukudiruppu’!

The Island Editorial

The LTTE propagandists are going hell for leather to have the world believe that Monday's air strikes on Pudukudiruppu killed over 60 school children and injured many others. The foreign media has picked the LTTE version and beamed it across the globe. The government insists that the Air Force targeted an LTTE camp and supports its claim with real time aerial pictures of the site and its vicinity in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. The video footage that the government has released to the media shows perimeter walls, trenches, mounds an ammo dump in addition to some buildings and uniformed LTTE combatants fleeing. A person described as an LTTE area leader is also shown in a double cab together with vehicles removing the casualties. The government says the attacks had been carried out after months of reconnaissance and the verification of the information so gathered, by intelligence operatives on the ground. It has offered to arrange for the SLMM to visit the areas and inspect the site.

The LTTE claim is not coherent in that it has called the place concerned different names–a school, an orphanage etc–and its latest claim is that it was a place where a group of children were undergoing a two-day residential course on first aid. It says different things at different times. However, the allegation of air strikes having harmed school children is too serious to be dismissed on the grounds of the LTTE's history of lying.

So, the only way to find the real situation is for a team of monitors, media personnel and human rights activists to visit the place in question, forthwith. If it is school children who have perished as the LTTE claims, the outfit should be more than willing to facilitate a fact finding tour so that it will have grist to the mill. However, no room should be left for the LTTE to tamper with evidence. If there are any perimeter walls, trenches, bunkers, arms dumps–or any traces thereof (in case of the LTTE trying to obliterate them)–then the LTTE has uttered a diabolical lie yet another time.

Similarly, the LTTE must be asked to allow the same team to visit its Batticaloa training camp attacked by the Air Force last week. Among the dead LTTE cadres, we learn, there were many child soldiers. The LTTE chose to remain silent on that particular attack as it had no way of denying that the place concerned was a training facility. If the LTTE denies that there were child combatants, then the SLMM and the UNICEF must ask the outfit to explain how so many children happened to be in its training camp at the time of air strikes. The same is true of Sampur, where the Air Force launched a series of air strikes in the aftermath of the attempt on Army Commander Lt. Gen. Sarath Fonseka's life. There, too, a large number of child combatants perished but the LTTE didn't make a noise.

The love of the LTTE for children is evident from its war cemetery, where one finds a large number of gravestones bearing all details of the dead combatants except years of birth. They, as is common knowledge, belong to child combatants and the LTTE must be asked where and under what circumstances they died.

Most orphanages in the North are under LTTE control and they have become recruiting centres for the outfit. At a press conference that Prabhakaran gave in Kilinochchi in 2002, LTTE Spokesman Anton Balasingham vehemently denied that the LTTE had child combatants. He claimed the LTTE had only children's welfare centres. He invited the foreign media to stay back a few days and visit those places. Whether the media accepted that offer or not is not known but the fact remains that Balasingham owned up to having control over orphanages. Placing orphans at the mercy of an outfit which the UNhas condemned and put on its List of Shame for using child soldiers is tantamount to a fox being put in charge of a poultry farm.

UNICEF and human rights groups active in this country ought to explain why there is no action plan to liberate orphans from the clutches of the LTTE, besides the child soldiers. It is orphans whom the LTTE turns into human bombs through years of brainwashing.

They, no doubt, have every right to call for a probe into the air strikes on Pudukudiruppu but they shouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture of violence against children in the North and the East, where most parents have stopped sending their children to school for fear of abductions.

The on-going battles in the Jaffna peninsula have also left a large number of child soldiers dead. The LTTE uses those unfortunate children to break military defences against heavy machinegun fire. The SLMM, UNICEF and human rights activists must visit the battle front to see for themselves how children perish in combat.

While a high level probe into the Pudukidiruppu incident is called for, the LTTE must be prevented from using it as a smokescreen to get away with its crimes against children and civilians.