(Jaffna) - Child soldiers have unmistakable eyes: They appear to be without emotion and very old. The prisoner Elisaman Jenova has this look too. It seems to stand in a great contradiction to her girlish voice and immature body.

Elisaman is only 17 years old and has already been an MG firer i the jungle. That she is still alive is only thanks to the fact that she was shot on 1 February near her heart, which led to unconsciousness. It prevented her from continuing to fight or to bite into the potassium cyanide capsule which all "Tamil Tigers" carry with them in order to prevent them from being taken prisoner. Now she is in the headquarters of the government troops on the Jaffna peninsula which was conquered back by them not so long ago.

Elisaman is the daughter of Elias Jenova from chundrikulam in the district of Jaffna. Her father is a fisherman and therefore belongs to that caste from which Velupillai Prabhakaran, the 43-year-old leader of the "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam", comes. At the beginning of 1995, when Elisaman was recruited, Chundikulam was still in the claws of the "Tigers".

The LTTE cadres went from fisher hut to fisher hut in Chundikulam and said that every family owed Prabhakaran a child. Elisaman went voluntarily, "Because my elder sister was ill. One brother was too young, the other had just married. It would have been a pity if his young wife became a widow so soon." She knew that she would be sent to her death: "The recruiting officer explained to me that I would either fall in the battle or that I would die in a suicide command for the cause. The latter would be a particular honour."

Elisaman Jenova went with the two LTTE recruiting officers without taking leave of her parents. "I thought at first that I would be taken to a politcal meeting, but I was taken into the jungle straight away."

What happened then proved to the officers who were taking part in this interview the cynicism of Prabhakaran: The "Tigers" gave the girl no basic training. Elisaman only learnt how to use a machine gun of the Belgian type FN. A lieutenant colonel: "This girl was planned as a one-way fighter, she was to be used up at the first attack. Therefore there was no reason for a military training."

Elisaman lived in the jungle for one and a half years. In this time she hardly ever saw grown-up "Tigers", let alone Prabhakaran. The trainers of the 15-year-old girl were 16-year-old girls. Just like Pol Pot Prabhakaran lets children brainwash other children. The daily manta of the child soldiers: "The Sinhalese are oppressing the Tamils. We must free them. You have the great honour to die for this cause. You needn't be afraid of death."

Elisaman and the other girls lived in a bunker, where they spent a life with unusually little contact. They were not allowed to put their arm around each other, they weren't even allowed to tough hands. There should be nothing to make up for physical contact with parents or brothers and sisters. The unkindness had a system: Elisaman was also not allowed to write to her parents; as it became apparent later on, they did not know either whether their daughter was alive or not. Not only was Elisaman a nameless member of a nameless unit of 90 doomed teenagers, they were in fact already dead, as their trainers told them.

At night the girls lay next to each other on their mats, in the morning at 4 o'clock they had to jump up, one kept post in the bunker, the other two had to search the camp for possible infiltrators. "then we washed ourselves with water which we got from a source in the jungle, we had rice and curry for breakfast, sometimes fish or beef."

Beef? In an area where most of the inhabitants are Hindus? How this worked is explained by the explosive expert Kurt Mohring from Wilhelmshaven, who searches for mines for the Society for Technical Cooperation", so that his colleagues can repair the water supply in Jaffna without being hurt. "Here are at least 300,000 mines", he explains, "therefore the farmers let the cattle go in front. If they trigger off an explosion, they have to be slaughtered, whether they are considered holy or not." Therefore beef is so often on the menu of the rebels.

After breakfast Elisaman, who is the second MG markswoman, practised for hours on her machine gun - a Nato weapon, which the rebels had bought with the money which had been given by Tamil exiles, just like almost all their war gear, In Germany alone 40,000 Tamils live who give 1000 DM on average per year per family to the terrorists in their homeland. In this life between loading, shooting, political lessons and sleeping Elisaman's world shrank. She didn't know any more what was happening outside of her jungle existence; there was no radio or television. Once a week the girls were taken to a central bunker where there were televisions. There they were shown a documentary film, which was about a battle in which the "Tigers" had killed over 1000 governmental soldiers.

Elisaman was prepared for a battle of this kind, when on 31 January her unit was moved to the dense jungle of the district of Kilinochchi, where the five brigades of the armny division 54 had set up their defence line along the national route A-9; this road leads from Jaffna to Kandy, the cultural centre of Sri Lanka. It has not been able to be used for years because of the guerrilla war.

Around midnight the 90 girls took up their positions, from which they were supposed to attack the governmental troops, in order to break up their defence line. For the first time Elisaman saw her boss, a young woman who gave orders to the girls troop, but who herself was under the command of male commanders.

At 13 hours the next day the "Tigers" attacked, and shortly afterward the offensive was already at an end, because the division 54 hit back with great force: With grenades, machine guns and with Kfir bombers which had been imported from Israel. "the first who died was our officer" says Elisaman, "then my first MG markswoman was dead. All around me I only saw dead people. I hid behind a bush. There I must have been hit. Out of the 90 girls five survived. Four of them tried to surrender. But according to the plans of the "Tigers" a capitulation is no option for one-way fighters, therefore they had nothing white with them with which they could have signalled their peacefulness. And although Tamils and Sinhalese have been on the island for thousands of years, the one ethnic group does not speak the language of the other, therefore the "Tiger girls" could not make themselves clear to the governmental soldiers. The military shot and after that only one of the 90 girls was still alive Elisaman lay unconscious with a shot in her chest behind the bushes. After days she regained consciousness in a military hospital.

The military prisoner Elisaman Jenova is not thinking of going back to the "Tigers", who would not forgive her for not having lost her life for the Tamil cause. In such cases the LTTE gives people short shrift.

But what does Elisaman, this traumatised fishersman's daughter with the black skin from Chnundikulam, actually want? "I want to return to my father and mother and to be a good child", she says. And then for the first time here lips move for the first time as if to smile. Her eyes do not smile

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