Child Soldiers of LTTE Tamil Tigers

The child bombers of Sri Lanka
BBC: July 28, 1998 : Unicef estimates there are around 500,000 children fighting in various wars throughout the world, particularly Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Uganda.

In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers, who are fighting for a separate homeland, have been employing children in their guerrilla forces for seven years. [Full Story]

Children in the North-East War:1985 -1995
University Teachers for Human Rights - Jaffna: June 20, 1995 : From the inception of the UTHR(J), we have constantly documented the use of children in violence, pointing out areas of concern. Our reports analysed the degeneration of the politics that lay behind this development. A host of studies in war zones around the world, including Jaffna, testify to traumatisation and other extreme adverse effects on children resulting from the ravages of war. This makes children even more vulnerable to propaganda, the content of which they are, even under normal conditions, in no position to judge. The use of children as tools of war, where they are manipulated and coerced into being the unwitting and unwilling perpetrators of war's inevitable atrocities and inhumanities, is therefore as pernicious as it is cynical. It can form no part of a genuine liberation struggle. It would thus hardly come as a surprise that the child recruits are drawn from the most vulnerable sections of society. These child victims in turn brutalise an entire society beyond human endurance.

The first use of children in the North-East war surfaced during the mid-eighties when various groups used them as sentries. These children were, sometimes, given grenades and asked to monitor the movements of the Sri Lankan Army as well as of other groups around their camps. When the LTTE attacked and killed several hundred cadres from the TELO in May 1986, several of these children who were on sentry duty were also brutally killed. The enlistment of very young children for military activities began about November 1987, following the establishment of the Indian Army's control over Jaffna. Children as young as ten were used as assassins by the LTTE in a bid to paralyse life in Jaffna. During the middle of 1989, the Indian-backed EPRLF-led coalition press-ganged thousands of youth for its Tamil National Army, hundreds of whom were later massacred by the LTTE. Among the conscripts were many children. [Full Story]