UN Envoy urges Lanka to release child soldiers of the Tigers

Retired Major General Patrick Cammaert, a top United Nations envoy urged Sri Lanka on Friday to release detained Tamil Tiger child soldiers and asked the authorities to re-unite them with their families.
Retired Major General Patrick Cammaert, the UN special envoy on children and armed conflict, said children who had been conscripted by the Tiger rebels should be allowed to return to their families.
“Hundreds of children are still missing or separated from their parents. They must be reunited as soon as possible,” the Dutch UN official told reporters.
Cammaert met nearly 300 children who were forcibly recruited by the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels during his visit, UN spokesman Gordon Weiss said.
“The best practice in other parts of the world show that children recover better from traumatic experiences when living with their loved ones,” Cammaert said at the end of a five-day visit to the island country.
Government forces crushed the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May and detained thousands, including child soldiers, who are still held in camps which are off limits for international aid agencies.
He said children in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) were also at risk.
The government allowed tens of thousands of civilians held in the IDP camps to go in and out freely from December 1, but aid agencies and reporters are still barred from entering them and speaking with inmates.
Earlier The Times, UK, reported that Sri Lanka is holding more than 11,000 Tamil prisoners without charge in closely guarded “rehabilitation centres”, despite the Government’s claim that it released all Tamil civilians from detention centres this week.
The Times revealed that the group of prisoners, whose exact number has been unknown since the Sri Lankan Government blocked access to them from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in July, is allegedly a “combatant category” that includes former Tamil Tiger (LTTE) fighters.
However, the definition of “Tamil Tiger” is unclear. Apart from the hardcore Tiger cadres, many of those in the camps are thought to be youths forcibly conscripted by the Tigers during the final stages of their collapse, as well as their family members and civil administrators.
According to media reports, the parents of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tiger leader killed this year, are being held in the notorious “4th Floor” detention complex in Colombo. They are in their seventies and had long been alienated from their son by his terrorist activities.
About 300,000 Tamil civilians were caught up in fighting earlier this year as the Sri Lankan military made its final push against the Tigers which used civilians as human shields. About 280,000 civilians were captured by the army and kept in detention centres. The last 130,000 prisoners were set free this week. But there is now concern over the fate of the 11,000 still being held. Detention without trial is familiar to many Sri Lankan prisoners, who can be incarcerated for the most trivial of reasons under the Government’s wideranging emergency powers and Prevention of Terrorism Act.
“Until July the ICRC had access to the 12 ‘rehabilitation’ camps in the Vavuniya area,” a former ICRC staff member said this week. “There are fewer of these camps now as some have amalgamated. Under-age LTTE fighters, as well as most of those who surrendered, are sent to these camps while senior LTTE cadres are held in CID custody then sent directly to Boosa Prison near Galle. The ICRC registered all of these prisoners, after which they informed their families of their whereabouts. But since the ICRC access was stopped it has left a big gap which still hasn’t been replaced.”
Recent reports suggest that the country’s authorities have authorised a new round of arrests over the past few weeks among civilians on the point of release.
Father V. Yogeswaran, director of the Centre for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, in Trincomalee, said: “I’ve got between 30 and 40 cases in which families have been released here from the detention centres, only to have their menfolk taken away at the final moment to a so-called rehabilitation centre.
(with agency inputs)