BATTICALOA: The recent split within the Tamil Tigers and the ensuing violence in the capital Colombo and in the eastern town of Batticaloa are seriously undermining the two- year ceasefire between the Sri Lankan government and the militants.
On-the-ground ceasefire monitors and humanitarian workers gave this warning as Sri Lanka's peace broker Norway announced on Wednesday that it had failed to secure an agreement with Tamil Tiger rebels to resume talks with the government.
Norway's top envoy Vidar Helgesen told President Chandrika Kumaratunga that no accord had been reached with the Tamil Tigers on a proposed agenda to reopen talks that have been suspended since April last year.
In April, Vinyagamorthi Muralitharan alias Col. Karuna, the former eastern military Tiger commander defected into government held areas following an internal rebellion. Though the Tiger high command based in Kilinochchi in the northern part of the country was able to re-establish its control over the east, violence between the two factions has increased in over the past two weeks.
On July 25, a Tiger statement said eight top aides of Karuna had been shot dead in the capital Colombo. The Tigers also claimed that a Sri Lankan military intelligence officer was among the dead, but the army has denied this.
The other day, Ramalingam Padmaseelan alias Lt Col Senathiraja, the Batticaloa political head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as the Tigers are formerly known, succumbed to gunshot injuries received during a shooting blamed on Karuna supporters.
Two others had earlier died during the same shooting incidents that occurred on July 5, the day the Tigers commemorate their suicide cadres. Two days after Senathiraja's death Mahendran Pulidaran a Tiger inmate at the Batticaloa jail shot and killed Kanapathipillai Mahendran alias Satchi Master and another prisoner.
Satchi Master was earlier accused by the Tigers of acting as the spokesperson on behalf of Karuna. The killings follow the murders of a journalist, a government servant, an academic in the east and an attempted assassination of a government minister in Colombo while intermittent skirmishes between Karuna supporters and the Tigers have been reported from the eastern jungles.
More than 64,000 people have been killed during the two decades of conflict. In February 2002, however, Norway helped broker a ceasefire between the Tigers and government troops.
The Tamil Tigers have been fighting a guerrilla war to establish 'Tamil Eelam', an independent state for the Tamil people, who are a minority ethnic community compared to the majority Singhalese population.
"It is only the tip of the iceberg that we are seeing, it is the sad reality," Susanne Ringgaard Pedersen, the head of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) in Batticaloa told IPS.
The SLMM has been receiving a spate of complaints on child recruitment and forced recruitment of young adults since the split. Pedersen said that in the past such complaints were not a weekly occurrence but since the split several were coming to them every week.
"There is definitely a recruitment drive going on. It is clear that the Tigers are trying to consolidate themselves," she said. Recently Amnesty International said that the Tigers were not only recruiting children but also resorting to violence against families that resist.
Citing figures from the United Nations Children's Fund or UNICEF, Amnesty said that since April 190 children have been recruited. The total figure according to UNICEF is 330 since January.
"If armed conflict were to resume, these children would likely be among the first to die," Amnesty said. UNICEF raised the issue of child recruitment with the Tigers two weeks ago, according to Geoffrey Keele - the UN agency's communications director for Sri Lanka - and was informed that the Tigers did not condone it and would look into the complaints.
There has been no communication since from the Tigers. UNICEF is currently running a rehabilitation home for child soldiers in Kilinochchi. Keele told IPS that UNICEF had also requested other donor countries and agencies to raise the issue with the Tigers.
Evidence corroborated by different sources indicates that children are being given training in firearms. "Training the children is completely against international law. The LTTE must take immediate steps at the highest levels to rectify this," said Keele.
The UNHCR office in Batticaloa has been investigating complaints on the forced recruitment of young adults between the ages of 19 to 25. Soon after Karuna fled from the Tiger high command, 450 of his former cadres came to the UNHCR and registered themselves saying that they did not want to go back to the rebel fold.
Annka Sandlund, the Batticaloa protection officer for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees said the agency had confirmed that 20 persons out of the 450 ex-Karuna cadres had been recruited by force. "So far the Tigers have not admitted that they have the 20," she said adding that cases of beating up of family members had been reported as well.
Despite claims by the Tiger high command that most of the cadres who supported Karuna have returned to the old fold and that the rebel enjoyed limited support, the recruitments suggest an acute need for manpower.
Karuna commanded 7,000 cadres in the east and the number of Tiger fighters that fled the rebel organization with him is around 2,000, according members of the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP) in Batticaloa.
EPDP leader Douglas Devananda who is a government minister has been having close links with Karuna since the split. Devananda recently survived an assassination attempt by a female suicide bomber in Colombo and blamed the Tiger high command for the suicide attack. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
