Child Soldiers: Fashioning A Moral Rod

The Sri Lankan government’s allegations that the Liberation Tigers are using child soldiers has now created a phalanx of international NGOs and pressure groups which campaign against the organisation. And despite the lack of independent verification of Colombo’s alarming claims, and a surprising shortage of empirical data, the matter has successfully become a central part of Sri Lanka’s efforts to criminalize the LTTE internationally.

The issue of ‘child soldiers’ has, in the past few years, become paramount in the concern of a number of actors involved in the Sri Lankan situation. While both local and foreign media have given the issue a great deal of space or airtime, a number of different (primarily international) non governmental organisations (NGOs) have worked indefatigably to ‘raise awareness’ of the alleged use of children as combatants by the Liberation Tigers. Although the conflict as a whole is relatively underreported in the international media, the issue of child soldiers has become the most sensationalised aspects of the protracted conflict.

A study of the attention - characterised by NGO or media reports - devoted to the issue of child soldiers over the period of Sri Lanka’s conflict, bares some clear watersheds. Arguably, it was with the start of the latest phase of the war in mid 1995, that attention on allegations of the Liberation Tigers’ use of child combatants increased substantially. Crucially, this also coincides with the period during which the Sri Lankan government imposed tight restrictions on access by independent observers into areas held by the Liberation Tigers.

In effect, for the past seven years, the international press and other external observers have not been able to enter what the Sri Lankan military refers to as ‘uncleared’ areas of the island. While the restriction has affected much of the reporting on the conflict, with reporters occasionally adding the obligatory ‘claims could not be independently verified’ on the few reports filed on the war, the greatest volume on the use of child solders has been generated during this period.

Meanwhile, the spectre of child soldiers itself has been a central plank of the Sri Lankan government’s international efforts to discredit the LTTE. The focus by international press and NGOs over the past few years on the issue of Tamil child soldiers is a testament to the success of the Sri Lankan government’s campaign strategy of “building an international coalition” against the alleged recruitment of children by the LTTE. The primary Sri Lankan assertions runs thus: that the LTTE specifically recruits children as combatants (by conscription) and its cadre consist primarily of children and that the organisation is thus inherently militarily weak and is compelled to desperate measures. The implications the international community is meant to draw from these allegations are: the LTTE is morally bankrupt - and hence has no legitimate political program, only uncompromising and destructive violence; that the organisation lacks active support amongst the Tamil community; that it can be - indeed can only be - contained militarily and hence does not pose a destabilising threat to the Sri Lankan state.

Incidentally, other key allegations intended to undermine the LTTE’s international standing that the organisation is involved in narcotics trafficking (See US State Department Reports 1998, 1999 and 2000) into the West and is strengthening links with international terrorist groups - have been unsuccessful due to a lack of corroborating evidence either from Colombo or - more importantly - Western security services. The theme of child soldiers, however, has proven to be one of the most resonant approaches chosen by the Sri Lankan government, able to capture and hold the spotlight of international attention, particularly since the use of children as combatants became an increasing global concern in the nineties - manifest in an expansion in this period in the number of NGOs involved with - and resources devoted to - efforts to prevent the practice.

Hence this strategy of persistent allegation - delivered from the highest echelons of the Sri Lankan state - over the years interspaced with carefully stage-managed fragments of ‘proof’ has been adopted by the present government since the resurgence of the conflict in April 1995. In particular, it has been vigorously pursued by the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, with supporting claims from the President and senior military officers, as a key aspect of his efforts to get the Liberation Tigers proscribed by world governments.

For the Sri Lankan establishment, promoting allegations of Tamil child soldiers has become one of the most effective ways of smearing the LTTE and thereby - crucially - building a consensus of international opinion that supports Colombo’s own military effort as a necessary means to crushing a morally reprehensible movement. This was achieved through a remarkably simple but clearly effective strategy of controlling access to the war zone while simultaneously disseminating selective pieces of information through a strictly limited number of sources that were responsible for promoting their own ‘data’ via international NGO and media networks. As a result, while it has become generally accepted by international media and NGOs that a significant proportion of LTTE cadres are either coerced or manipulated child conscripts, very little attention has been paid to other aspects of the conflict including the military ebb and flow, and none to the underlying causes and related issues.

More crucially, the necessity of independently verify Sri Lankan allegations has become less critical for NGOs and has been superseded by a practice of working off these ‘truisms’ and focussing on efforts to correct the LTTE’s behaviour.

It was the particular military strategy selected by the Sri Lankan government in 1995 that necessitated a political consensus of unequivocal support for the massive military effort. The government planned to capture by conventional assault and hold large areas of land dominated by centres of civilian population, in order to deny the LTTE the recruitment pool and resources it required to endure, and thereafter to engage the organisation in high-intensity war of attrition over a sustained period. Large numbers of civilian casualties were thus inevitable (as was later seen in the battles for Jaffna, Kilinochchi and a number of towns in the Vanni) and could prove internationally damaging.

Thus soon after the war resumed in April 1995, the Government issued new regulations on civilian movement into and out of the war zone. All persons wishing to enter the conflict areas required clearance from the ministry of defence. Journalists were prohibited from entering ‘uncleared’ areas, ostensibly for their own well being, as these were areas which safety could not be guaranteed. Meanwhile access for journalists to army controlled areas was also limited to military conducted tours. The scarcity of accurate information and informed analysis on the war allowed the government the freedom to introduce its own themes and priorities in the discussion of the Sri Lankan conflict. The overall aim of the Sri Lankan campaign was to build a consensus in which the war was seen as an absolute necessity, a “war for peace” as President Kumaratunga termed it for many years.

Ironically, having sought and obtained a publicity-generating visit to Sri Lanka by the United Nations Secretary General’s special envoy on children in armed conflict, Olara Ottunu in May 1998, the Sri Lankan government attempted to obstruct his entering the LTTE-held areas of the island.

It was the official’s personal persistence which resulted in his crossing the defence lines to meet LTTE leaders in the Vanni. At the meeting, Ottunu discussed with the LTTE the matter of raising the movement’s minimum recruitment age from 16 to 17, and pointedly did not endorse Sri Lanka’s sweeping claims. While Ottonu has since expressed his disappointment that the LTTE had not raised its minimum age from 16 to 17, the claim of widespread use of child-soldiers as described by Sri Lanka has failed to be accepted by the UN.

Sri Lanka’s success in using the issue of child soldiers to illegitimise the LTTE has been the result of the government’s ability to produce ‘evidence’ at intervals. However, a critical distillation of the voluminous material that has been generated on the subject in the past few years produces only a few key sources that claim to have primary empirical evidence of the LTTE’s use of children as child soldiers. The majority of these sources - which are either the Sri Lankan military itself or a select group of Colombo-based NGOs - are either directly or indirectly linked to - and hence share a vested interest in - the government’s strategy of building an international coalition of criticism against the LTTE.

At critical points over the past five years, the government has produced data which is meant to support, by generalisation, that the LTTE uses very young children in active combat. A handful of individual ‘prisoners’, presented at strategic times in carefully managed media exercises are offered as proof that almost all LTTE cadres are underage children.

For example, as the British government was preparing legislation on terrorism last year, under which Sri Lanka was demanding the LTTE be proscribed, two journalists, one from a leading British broadsheet and another from an internationally read daily newspaper, were specifically taken to Jaffna to meet a fifteen year old Tamil girl in military custody, who the army claimed was a member of the LTTE. Her story was published on both papers’ front pages. As an aside, the story did not appear in any other media - including the Sri Lankan press. Similar ‘information’ is also provided privately by Sri Lankan military officials and NGO’s supportive of the government usually to select journalists and international researchers in Colombo.

By providing information that cannot be independently verified or disputed and simultaneously restricting access to the conflict areas, the Sri Lankan government has been able to establish the use of child soldiers as one of the key premises of its argument that the LTTE must be politically marginalized and dealt with militarily. Indeed articles that deal with the issue of child soldiers often slip unobtrusively into an argument about the need to crack down on the activities of pro LTTE Tamil communities in western countries.

A key aspect of the Sri Lankan campaign is that from its inception been directed towards the international community, not the local Tamil or Sinhala populace. Foreign journalists are selected to meet young Tamil children - mostly girls - in military custody who describe - through army translators - their ‘experiences’ and the issue is subsequently aggressively promoted in the international arena. Since the “necessity” of the Sri Lankan government’s military campaign rested on the projected intolerable moral bankruptcy of the opponent, Foreign Minister Kadirgamar has made it a priority to promote the issue at international forums. By the same taken, efforts to reduce child prostitution (sex tourism has become a significant industry in Sri Lanka), or other matters under the UN Rights of the Child, have been conspicuously absent in the Foreign Minister’s campaigns.

In the past three years, the course of the conflict itself has challenged the Sri Lankan government’s assertions. The scale of the battles fought between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces, in terms of the size of territory being contested, the strategy and weaponry deployed and resultant casualties challenge the core of Sri Lanka’s claims, that the movement comprises mainly children.

Thus the onus remains with the international press and NGO communities to reevaluate the issue of Tamil child soldiers within their respective fields. If the collective objective is to pressure the LTTE to abandon a practice it does not engage in, the result will be to undermine those applying the pressure in the perceptions of both the organisation - and its support base. When the pressure is perceived as being one sided (e.g. in the absence of criticism of the Sri Lankan armed forces for rights violations, or of the government for blocking independent verification), then the objectives of the actors involved will inevitably be treated as suspect by the Tamil community.