Desperate for recruits, the LTTE has tried to close schools in areas under their control and enlist students into their fighting forces, the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) has said.

The Jaffna based organisation said that the Tigers wanted children over 13-years old to take up arms and halt the army's offensive aimed at capturing the strategic main supply route between Vavuniya and Kilinochchi. While much of this highway has been taken in the year long Jayasikuru campaign, there is yet some distance to cover.

The rights group, which is often criticised by the LTTE, said the rebels had stopped targeting students and were sending senior cadres to persuade school children to join the militant group.

"You are all happy about the heavy casualties we inflicted on the Sri Lankan forces at Mankulam. But we too suffer casualties in dead and injured", the group quoted a Tiger rebel leader as telling students.

"We have plenty of money and ammunition. Unless you join and support our heroic fighting forces, we cannot continue to resist the enemy with the same intensity".

The UTHR said the parents have begun asserting themselves and forced the LTTE drop plans to proclaim a state of war.

"One respect in which developments are favourable in the LTTE controlled area from a democratic point of view, is that the people are beginning to assert themselves", the UTHR's latest report said.

The report said the LTTE was conducting street dramas in a bid to encourage youngsters to join the movement and the theme of one play was to attack the Tamil elite who ask others to send children to battle while protecting their own.

"It reveals a mood of such scepticism in the Vanni, that to get any sympathy from the audience the LTTE now finds it necessary to attack this segment among its former supporters, who are again very typical of its overseas support base", the UTHR said.

The LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran said just over two weeks ago that they lost 1,300 of their cadres while trying to stop Jayasikuru.

Despite reported manpower shortages, two other leaders of the LTTE told a visiting United Nations official recently that the group would immediately stop recruiting children below 17 years and stop using child soldiers.

However, the UTHR said the Tigers were faced with poor recruitment as well as desertion, a problem shared by the Sri Lankan security forces.

It said one of the reasons for the poor response to the LTTE's recruitment campaigns was a feeling among civilians that they had already sacrificed a good deal for the "Tamil cause" without achieving anything besides death and destruction.

LTTE recruitment hampered by civilian resistance

"AN intense campaign of recruitment has been going on (in LTTE-controlled areas) with a target of 5000. Political speeches are regularly made in schools and public places followed by street drama performances. In Madhu refugee camp a spokesman recently said, "You are all happy about the heavy causalities we inflicted on the Sri Lankan forces at Mankulam. But we too suffer casualties in dead and injured. We have got plenty of money, weapons and ammunition. Unless you join and support our heroic fighting forces, we cannot continue to resist the same intensity."

Despite these intensive efforts, the response to the recruitment drive has been poor. Those who join are scattered individuals here and there, rather than groups of persons. For this reliable estimates are not possible. For example the LTTE claimed recently that it had recruited 100 in Mallavi the main refugee settlement in the Mullaitivu district. But local sources place the number at less than 200. The number of recruits in the whole of Vanni in recent months is generally estimated to be about 500 although figures such as 1500 are also floated about. None of those we have spoken to recall cases of child recruitment (say 12 and below). This is partly because recruitment itself is scattered and no longer a prominent phenomenon. In generally the target age seems to be about 14 or 15 above. This is a sign that the short-term need for immediate combat is paramount. The situation is unlike the early '90s in Jaffna when the LTTE proudly displayed recruits aged ten and sometimes even eight. That was when the LTTE ran a virtual mini state with a command of resources supplied by the government, making it feasible to sustain a reserve army of children.

The LTTE has been campaigning for recruits in the cleared areas around Vavuniya too. Their message was that they had killed 3000 soldiers who were part of the army's northern advance, and wanted others to join them and share in the LTTE's triumph. The response is reportedly negligible.

Stretched for manpower

There are several other indications that the LTTE is stretched for manpower. An appeal has gone out to former members of the LTTE who have married and settled down to rejoin the fighting forces, on the pledge that it would look after their families. In earlier years those wanting to leave after seven years were normally given permission to leave if they so wished. Currently there is much foot-dragging on applications for release for those who have completed seven years. Methods of recruitment too have become increasingly questionable with the passage of time. They capitalise on momentary indecision, quick removal and isolation from families. Many of the recent recruits are persons who have been stopped on the street, brainstormed, given promises of glory and pledges to look after the family, urged to get onto the bar of a bicycle the moment they showed some vacillation, and quickly taken away.

Under these conditions one would have expected marked desertion, but for the fact that escape was difficult and prospects in the cleared (army controlled) are uncertain. Yet desertion is prominent enough for people to be aware of it despite every village having LTTE information.

Recently, for example, a group of more than half a dozen women Sea Tigers walked away in Mullaitivu after handling their cyanide capsules to colleagues. Some of them had experience of seven years and are known to have been fierce fighters. Those who had encountered them said that out of the organisation they were behaving like lambs. Most of them have been caught and punished.

The LTTE's street drama themes are also reflective of the public mood. There are of course the usual themes. The older member of family try to prevail on a younger member not to join the LTTE on the plea that security and studies are more important. The next thing is that the same older members are killed in aerial bombing by the Sri Lankan Air Force. The message is clearly that studies and security are meaningless until the state forces are defeated. More ironical are street drama themes which focus on issues that some the LTTE's strongest critics have been raising.

One criticism is the LTTE's ardent cultivation of rank hypocrites and opportunists among the elite who are portrayed the LTTE's current dramas as making speeches to inveigle other people's children to join the LTTE while being very careful in ensuring that their own children do not join. It reveals a mood of such scepticism in the Vanni, that to get sympathy from the audience the LTTE now finds it necessary to attack this segment among its former supporters, who are again very typical of its overseas support base.

Tactical change

There is also an evident tactical change in the approach of LTTE recruiters to the civilian population in the Vanni. Some of them told civilians who usually move with them that their leader himself has given them strict instructions not to alienate the civilian population. They have been asked to bear with criticism, but to somehow get on with the job of recruitment. In practice, what the recruiters do is to allow the people to criticise and change the subject by saying something Like, "We would even like you to come and help us. You don't have to do anything very risky, you could just carry ammunition or carry away the injured." Thus even the little room the people now have to protest and assert themselves at least in the interest of protecting their children, has been paid for in enormous suffering. Even this could be lost overnight either through the LTTE pulling off some stunning action that catches the government off balance, or through the cumulative effects of the government's own inadequacies, routine callousness shown in aerial bombing and its corruption.

Another recent episode is suggestive of the pressures faced by the LTTE. When the Roman Catholic bishop of Jaffna came to Madhu for the festival during the middle of last year he was totally ignored the LTTE. Circles close to him expressed disappointment that the LTTE appeared not to be interested in a settlement. They felt that the LTTE could have used the bishop's visit to communicate some suggestion for a way forward. But this year in March, we reliably understand that the LTTE sent an invitation to the bishop in Jaffna to come to the Vanni and talk to them.

A meeting was duly held early April with the LTTE side represented by Anton Balasingam among others. Leading circles in Madhu were aware that the bishop of Jaffna had a meeting with the LTTE in Periya Madhu, but had no knowledge of Balasingam's participation which was revealed in the media. Those at Madhu thought that the talks were about seeing the LTTE's cooperation to enable the displaced population to move back to the cleared area in Jaffna, the south coast of Mannar district (e.g. Arippu, Mullikulam and Silavathurai) and the newly cleared areas in Vavuniya district along the army`s northward advance. In this connection they thought that the talks had been successful and that many people are now moving out without hindrance from the LTTE.

A senior LTTE cadre from Mullaitivu confirmed several of these trends. The loss of Jaffna, he said, was among other things, a crucial financial loss.

Local running expenses were, according to him, met with funds collected in local currency and foreign collections played no role in the Vanni. Foreign currency was used for military supplies and logistics. In material terms, he said, the LTTE had what it needed, adding that where fighting cadre were concerned, the numbers coming in were inadequate. He said there were recruits from `Batticaloa' and Trincomalee,' but were (agewise) in general `small' (chinnan).

Their logistics, he said were intact, and foreign travel to any part of the world was not a problem. Some of the fringe pan-Dravidian groups in Tamil Nadu were sending persons to the Vanni for training by the LTTE. From these same connections, an unspecified number of Indian mercenaries are said to be serving large. But there are pointers to the explosive tendencies inherent in delaying putting a political settlement into effect.

Security or harassment?

The scene in a school in a LTTE controlled area during a propaganda session illustrates the general scepticism prevalent there. After finishing their speeches the speakers from the LTTE asked those in the audience who wanted Tamil Eelam to put their hands up. A few hands slowly went up. Disappointed by the poor response the speakers called for those who did not want Eelam to put their hands up. Only one hand went up. Before the speakers could get to work on the person who put his hand up, the others joined in saying that he had made a mistake.

By contrast, in the government-controlled area, people increasingly feel from their day to day experience that separation is being imposed on them through a hopelessly corrupt and insensitive government machinery.

Constant anxiety

In Jaffna itself, the government has to some extent succeeded in putting its best foot forward. But elsewhere, the collective experience of the Tamils is of being branded, harassed and turned into milch cows. The branding is evident in the often humiliating manner Tamils are singled out in public during security checks. They have to live with a constant anxiety neurosis, worrying about whether they have all the right bits of paper with them, whether they would be stranded in the middle of a long-distance journey, locked up or sent back. Typically, when the identity card reveals a person to be a Tamil or if a person is identified as a part of the crowed in a bus bound to a Tamil area, he or she would be kept waiting at a sentry point in Anuradhapura, nervously fumbling for all the bits of paper.

A Tamil going home to Mannar or Vavuniya would be required to carry as the minimum the identity card, a local pass, the police registration in Colombo, the pass issued at Cheddikulam if in Mannar and evidence of vocation. In Mannar for example, one staying at Pesalai or Vankalai wanting an extension of the local pass by say two days, will have to set off early by bus, join a queue at the pass office in Mannar and sometimes be arbitrarily turned back after a long wait to come back in the afternoon or the following day.

While people do not generally experience difficulties at checkpoints, this is often because they have taken their loss of dignity for granted. This often comes out when a particular soldier is challenged for ordering someone to get off the bicycle and walk when there are absolutely no written instructions telling people the routine to be followed at the particular checkpoint. The angry soldier's reply could often take the form "When you see the army, you get down and walk."

Harassment has become so much part of life that often getting a small job done requires far more effort than the job is worth in time and money. Getting five bags of cement to a point just outside Mannar town requires standing in queues and paperwork involving the GS, MPCS, OICs at police checkpoints and being turned away and coming again when a particular official is not available. If only three bags are approved by the MPCS, citing a shortage, the same procedure will have to be gone through to get the balance. People do get flabbergasted to find that they have been given a short supply so that large quantities could be smuggled off to the LTTE controlled area past the same police checkpoints.

Such a system can breed only corruption to the total exclusion of humanity. A relatively mild example of the latter was witnessed at the Chettikulam checkpoint recently.

In a Mannar bound passenger bus, a woman and a man aged 80 were found to be without identity cards. The Tamil woman, a native of Mannar, had gone to work in the Middle East through agents who had supplied her with a passport under a Upon her return the agents had removed her passport. This is a well-known racket involving official corruption at high levels that has been going on for more than 20 years. The police at Chettikulam sent the man and the woman back by putting them into a bus to Kalpitiya, against the fervent pleas of the driver and the conductor of the Mannar bus.

No security threat

The 80 year old man posed a security threat to no one. In the case of the woman, the most reasonable thing was to let her proceed to Mannar where the Mannar police could check out her credentials instead of sending her to places where she was totally defenceless.

Also at this same check point one could witness elderly and infirm persons groping for help from passersby to struggle up to the queue and fare the worst in the disorderly rush. Having got their bit of paper, they need to struggle back to the bus again by groping at strangers who may be kind enough to assist them.

Does it make any sense , considering that they are after all citizens of the same country merely going from one place to another? Such instances are just the thin end of the wedge.

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