|
AL JAZEERA MEETS SIX TAMIL
UNDERAGE GIRLS WHO ESCAPED FROM A TIGER CAMP AT THOPPIGALA
By Walter Jayawardhana
An under aged girl told a reporter of Al Jazeera Television that she
was kidnapped while going with her mother to visit her grandmother after
cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) attacked her mother.
"I was walking with my mother going to see my grandmother,”
one of the girls told Al Jazeera. "Then the LTTE attacked my mother
and took me away," said one of six girls who said they were forced
to fight for the separatist terrorist group at Thoppigala , or Barrons
Cap Rock area where the insurgent group has just lost four terrorist
camps and on the verge of surrender.
Tony Birtley of Al Jazeera Television reported from Sri Lanka’s
Eastern Province that, “In a police station in eastern Sri Lanka,
six, seemingly ordinary teenage girls wait to be processed. Their short
hairstyles mark them out as female fighters in the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Elam.
Al Jazeera further reported, “Pushpu, another of the girls, says
she was taken three months ago as she tended her parents vegetable garden.
“Most of the girls are about 16-years-old. Pushpu is only 14.
“The girls were trained to use machine guns and dig bunkers in
an area called Thoppigala, bombarded daily by the Sri Lankan army. They
say they ran away because they could not bear the hardships of life
with the Tigers.
“They say they are innocent victims and that they just want to
go back to school, but first they will either be sent to jail or for
rehabilitation.
“The girls' stories are part of a growing problem in Sri Lanka,
where a wave of abductions and assassinations have swept the country,
blamed on everything from politics to death squads and criminals.
“In the east of the country the activities of a Tamil group led
by Colonel Karuna, a former LTTE leader, have come under scrutiny.
“He has started a political party and now his political opponents
have disappeared, but there is no direct evidence against him.
“Very few families are prepared to talk about the growing number
of abductions.
“One woman, though, did speak to Al Jazeera. Her 29 year old son,
a rickshaw taxi driver, was taken away by two men nearly a year ago.
Nothing has been heard since.’
Although Colonel Karuna started his political group called Thamil Makkal
Viduthalai Pulikal while declaring he was against the politics of terrorism
of Velupillai Prabhakaran , he is increasingly found out to be kidnapping
children like his former leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and engaged in
kidnapping of political opponents and individuals who could afford to
pay him ransom.
Al Jazeera for this program interviewed relatives of a Vice Chancellor
who got disappeared last December and who is suspected to have been
abducted by the Karuna Group by many groups. The Karuna group who dislikes
Jaffna Tamils, as they are Batticaloa Tamils, were suspected of being
the perpetrators of the crime as the Vice Chancellor was a Jaffna Tamil
although there is no evidence whatsoever that he was kidnapped by any
group. There is no mention of the Karuna Group being suspected of the
crime in the Al Jazeera program.
This is what they reported: “Professor Sivasubramaniam Ravindranth,
the vice Chancellor of the Eastern University in Batticaloa, disappeared
after attending a conference in Colombo last December.
"We haven't got even a single call or nothing. We didn't know anything
where he is or whether he alive or not," Dushyanthi Malaravan,
his daughter, told Al Jazeera.
"But we hope because they can't do anything to him because he is
a very kind man, polite, he talks a little but ... no words to say,"
she said, falling silent.
|
