The Indian armed forces have cleared military hardware for export to Sri Lanka, among other countries, after Colombo requested a number of items.

 

The chief of naval staff, Admiral Arun Prakash, told The Telegraph in an interview that military items for export had been “cleared for security”.

 

The clearance is not specifically for items requested by Sri Lanka but also covers them.

 

“The policy so far has been not to give them (Sri Lanka) offensive weapons. But our instructions from the government are we must do everything to protect the sovereignty and integrity of Sri Lanka,” Prakash said.

 

“We have been in dialogue with DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation). We can now export some types of sonars, radars, electronic warfare suites and some makes of naval guns,” he said.

 

The navy chief limited himself to saying that some exports to Sri Lanka were cleared. He acknowledged that Colombo has requested Delhi for “a lot of things”. The politics of giving military aid to Sri Lanka is complex.

 

“As far as we are concerned, military-to-military relations with all our neighbouring countries are very good — Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Bangladesh.... For instance, if our ships require berthing and replenishment facilities anywhere in the region — Seychelles, the Maldives, Mauritius, Sri Lanka — they are available,” he said.

 

Delhi has been dithering over Colombo’s long list of hardware that it needs in its fight against the LTTE.

 

Colombo has made it plain that it wants a defence cooperation agreement with Delhi. But three factors have played on Delhi’s Lanka policy before taking any step that might be interpreted as interventionist.

 

First, Delhi’s policy has so far been not to arm neighbours with equipment that could pose a threat to India.

 

Second, there are concerns over the political fallout from Tamil Nadu.

 

Third, India has burnt its fingers in Sri Lanka with the peacekeeping force it sent there in 1987 and does not want those memories to be revived.

 

But now apprehensions that Pakistan and/or China are stepping into the vacuum created by lack of Indian critical support are coming true.

 

Sri Lanka has already sourced military hardware from Pakistan as India winked.

 

Delhi is worryingly monitoring Islamabad’s efforts to use its arms supply to Sri Lanka as a lever to create a point of consternation in the island nation.

 

In August, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told MDMK chief Vaiko that India will not do anything to reinforce the Sri Lankan armed forces.

 

But it is the Indian Navy’s job to monitor and guard against the LTTE, which has a seaborne capability.

Following its first official visit to India last month, Sri Lanka’s largest Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is "reassured" by Delhi’s thinking on the Tamil question in the island, party officials told reporters.

 

A delegation led Parliamentary Group leader R. Sampanthan held "cordial, comprehensive and productive" meetings with top Indian officials, including National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan, Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed and Foreign Secretary-designate Shivshankar Menon, the sources said.

 

The TNA leadership hoped to meet with India’s Premier in future, but was pleased Dr. Manmohan Singh "is taking a personal interest in the Tamil question," a member of the TNA delegation told TamilNet.

 

A much-hoped for though unscheduled meeting with India’s Premier did not take place, but the top Indian officials the TNA delegation met with had assured them that Dr. Singh was taking “a personal interest” in the Tamil question and would engage directly with President Mahinda Rajapakse on developments in Sri Lanka, according to the TNA sources.

 

Speaking to reporters in India later, Mr. Sampanthan, who was upbeat on the outcome of the India visit, said, “the visit has brought New Delhi a lot closer to the Tamils of Sri Lanka.”

 

“After a long time we (Tamils) have been able to re-establish contact with New Delhi,” he said.

 

India had maintained a distance from Tamil groups from Sri Lanka since the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, which Delhi blames on the LTTE.

 

Asked if the TNA’s inability to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on this visit was a snub, Mr. Sampanthan said no date and time had been fixed for a meeting.

 

The TNA leadership was keen to meet Dr. Singh in the future and would continue to keep him briefed on developments through the top-level Indian officials they met instead, TNA officials told Tamilnet.

 

The TNA delegation met with the top Indian officials on Wednesday Sep 21 and Thursday Sep. 22.

 

On Wednesday the delegation met with Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed and Foreign Secretary-designate Shivshankar Menon for a lengthy discussion on the Tamil question.

 

On Thursday they met with National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan for an hour-long discussion, from 4 to 5 p.m. on the humanitarian and security crisis in Sri Lanka’s Northeast.

 

Their visit to Delhi was arranged around an invitation by the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA), which is India’s premier foreign affairs think tank, enjoying close links with the Indian ministry of External Affairs.

 

In the wake of the meetings, the TNA delegation was “greatly encouraged at the extent to which [the Indian government] was already aware of the considerable difficulties of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka,” the TNA parliamentarian said.

 

Among the issues discussed were the severe humanitarian crisis amongst the Tamils of Sri Lanka, the military agenda of the Sri Lankan state and the Norwegian peace-process, according to the TNA sources.

 

 “We are here to urge India to get the Sri Lankan government to behave in a civilised manner, to stop the killing of innocent Tamil civilians by aerial bombings. The present situation is like how it was in 1983, when as many as 250,000 people were displaced,” Mr. Sampanthan said.

 

“I do not think anyone else can play as effective a role as India in restoring peace between the Sinhalese and Tamil ethnic groups,” he said, insisting that LTTE was not averse to such a settlement.

India’s former spy chief has criticised Delhi for not engaging with the both the Liberation Tigers and Sri Lanka’s government to prevent the slide into conflict.

 

"India's inability to fully comprehend the ground realities in Sri Lanka and, hamstrung by the past, its reluctance to do business with LTTE to help evolve an equitable settlement may prove to be a monumental foreign policy blunder,” J.K. Sinha, former head of India’s external intelligence agency said.

 

“India’s ambivalence interspersed with gratuitous hostile statements towards the LTTE has closed its option to proactively bring about a settlement of the ethnic crisis through negotiations”

 

"India allowed the gradual erosion of the peace process and remained a virtual bystander," Singh, who headed the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) until last year, says in the latest issue of ‘Indian Defence Review.’

 

Singh was head of RAW in the past few years during which the 2002 Ceasefire Agreement has disintegrated in a cycle of violence first between Army-backed-paramilitaries and the LTTE and lately between the military and the Tigers.

 

"Instead of building on the positive developments at Oslo, India allowed its misgivings and suspicions with regard to the LTTE to stifle any follow-up policy initiative," Singh said, in reference to the LTTE’s agreement with the then Sri Lankan government to explore federalism as a solution.

 

“India was content to remain in the margins. [But] the resumption of civil war in Sri Lanka portends the worst for that country and for India's security concerns in the region,” he says.

 

"The gradual erosion of the peace process and the resumption of the conflict is a major setback for India and to its security concerns vis-à-vis Sri Lanka."

 

Singh noted that “India cannot help the Sri Lankan government militarily to defeat the LTTE because of the sentiments in Tamil Nadu and the compelling political constraints that it entails.”

 

“[But] India’s ambivalence interspersed with gratuitous hostile statements towards the LTTE has closed its option to proactively bring about a settlement of the ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka through a process of negotiations,” he also says.

 

"India's ambivalence about the LTTE and its inability to pull its weight in Sri Lanka in favour of the peace process shall cost India dear. India is now caught between the devil and the deep sea,” Sinha warns.

 

Singh slammed the seizure by President Chandrika Kumaratunga of three ministries from the government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in late 2003, just days after the LTTE submitted a proposal to set up an interim administration in Sri Lanka's northeast.

 

"India and the international community should have done all that was possible to prevent (Chandrika) from resorting to the politically dishonest and unconstitutional measure which really scuttled the peace process," Sinha said.

 

"[Meanwhile] It is indeed ironical that Colombo, which conspired with LTTE to force the return of the Indian Army (in 1990), now looks up to New Delhi to rein in LTTE and play a decisive role as the regional superpower to bring about a durable peace."

 

India this week called for "special efforts" to end the upsurge of violence in Sri Lanka and said New Delhi supported a political settlement that would not break up the island.

 

"We believe that today more than ever before special efforts are required to strengthen the ceasefire," India's Youth Affairs and Sports Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar said

 

Violence since December in Sri Lanka has claimed the lives of at least 1,500 people, according to official count.

 

Aiyar said India supported moves for a "devolution package that could command consensus among the major political parties, restore ethnic harmony and expeditiously address the legitimate aspirations of all sections of Sri Lankan society."

 

He said he was also meeting with President Mahinda Rajapakse to discuss the Indian model of a devolution of power in the country, which has a large ethnic Sinhalese majority.

 

New Delhi is strongly backing efforts by Norway to broker peace in Sri Lanka where an Oslo-arranged truce has tenuously held since February 2002.

 

Delhi had an "abiding interest" in the sovereignty, unity and the territorial integrity of the island republic, which lies off the south Indian coast, Aiyar also said, at a lecture to mark the 47th anniversary of the assassination of the island's premier Solomon Bandaranaike.

 

Speaking in India, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) Parliamentary Group leader R. Sampanthan said “Sri Lanka's constitution is like an albatross.”

 

“It permits the dismissal of an elected government after a year. It encourages colonisation by Sinhalese in Tamil areas. It discriminates on the basis of language. You cannot find a solution to the Sri Lanka-LTTE problem within the Lankan Constitution.”

In a complete reversal of their position, New York based NGO, Human Rights watch (HRW), which earlier this year described the Tamil Diaspora as caught in a ‘culture of fear’ of the LTTE this week turned to Tamil expatriates to exert their influence on the LTTE in support of human rights.

In March this year, HRW published a damning report claiming Tamil expatriates were being terrorised by LTTE fund-raisers extorting money from them to finance the war in Sri Lanka. The report, which was specifically cited by the Canadian government when it banned the LTTE in April, caused outrage amongst expatriates.

But on Saturday August 5, HRW Asia Director Brad Adams joined Professor Philip Alston, UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killings in asking for the Diaspora to exert their influence on the LTTE to implement their recommendations on human rights.

At an event in London, Professor Alston launched a Tamil version of his report, which says, among other things that “the diaspora has a responsibility to use its considerable political and financial influence and funding to promote and to insist upon respect for human rights.”

Professor Alston and Adams said it was vital that the Diaspora make it clear to the LTTE that the war would not be won by territorial and military considerations alone but by considerations of legitimacy and respect for international human rights standards.

The Diaspora had a duty to ensure the LTTE met these standards, they argued. Supporting the LTTE unquestioningly, said Professor Alston, was like bringing up your child to do whatever he liked; it was counterproductive and not helpful to the child because he would not learn to act as a responsible adult.

The metaphor where the LTTE was likened to a ‘child’ of the Tamil Diaspora is astonishing in the context of previous policy statements by HRW and United Nations.

On the face of it, the event should have been a walk in the park for the organisers. After all, who doesn’t subscribe to human rights standards as a matter of principle? Philip Alston provided an additional incentive (as if the matter of principle was not sufficient). He said one had to be seen to be meeting international standards of legitimacy in order to achieve political goals, including that of a separate state.

But instead of support, the organisers were met with anger and a litany of complaints against their organisations’ conduct from many of the Tamil Diaspora. The event highlighted systemic disagreement between the panellists and the sections of the Tamil Diaspora being addressed by the former’s appeal.

After the conference, a clarification was sought from HRW on their understanding of the extent of voluntary support for the LTTE compared to the proportion that was being reportedly being pressured by the Tigers.

Adams replied on behalf of Human Rights watch that he had absolutely no idea. A member of the audience had claimed that the LTTE had the support of eighty percent of the Tamil Diaspora. Mr Adams thought that might well be true, but he admitted he did not really know.

In essence, Adams admitted they had no statistical information on the extent of LTTE support among the Diaspora, and further that they had no capability to obtain such information. The Asia Director of HRW said this was the first time he had been to London to meet the UK Diaspora.

But Adams did not even accept that statistics had any bearing on Jo Becker’s controversial report on fund raising by the LTTE and related organisations. In short, HRW did not know if the people who had alleged intimidation by fundraisers were a statistically significant proportion of the overall population or not – even though the report had repeatedly alluded that it was.

Adams argued that, in any case, HRW’s position was not a question of mathematics or science. He refused to accept there was even a question of proportionality. He said that if even one person felt that they were being intimidated then HRW would find itself obliged to report on it.

But for anyone who read the original HRW report this comes across as a major shift in position. The report painted a picture of a community gripped by fear and ill served by British or Canadian police or their parliamentary representatives. An entire section of the original report was dedicated to why no prosecutions had been brought in the western democracies where these offences were allegedly taking place.

It even claimed: “in Canada, the Tamil community forms a powerful voting bloc, and many members of Parliament from ridings (electoral districts) in the Toronto area are dependent on Tamil votes. Some Canadian Tamils suggest that as a result, many members of parliament are reluctant to address LTTE intimidation.”

Jo Becker, the author, in an interview with the BBC Sinhala service had countered allegations of an underlying political agenda by saying “Our only agenda is to safeguard the human rights of the expatriate Tamils.”

But Adams’ revelation that he has no idea what the Diaspora really thinks or wants and that further they had not taken trouble to find out sharply contradicts Miss Becker’s emphatic need to save the community from the LTTE.

HRW had previously issued a qualification of its report, saying it was ‘qualitative rather than quantitative’. Brad Adams said on Saturday was that the estimated several dozen people interviewed worldwide (the HRW report itself prominently leaves out the sample base) between October last year and February for Becker’s report had “appeared to give credible accounts.” Readers have to take Jo Becker’s word for it because the witnesses remained anonymous.

But even on a ‘qualitative’ basis the report runs into difficulties. A search of the HRW website reveals that Becker, an experienced human rights researcher, has written only two reports on Sri Lanka, both of them virulently anti-LTTE. This despite the fact that of the over thirty five thousand civilians killed in the Sri Lankan conflict the overwhelming majority have been Tamil civilians killed by government forces.

Becker’s March report was leaked to the Sri Lankan minister of foreign affairs before it was published. The report immediately preceded and was cited in the Canadian government’s ban of the LTTE.

The UK launch of Miss Becker’s earlier (November 2004) report (on child soldiers) had been organised by well-known anti-LTTE radio station, TBC (Tamil Broadcasting Corporation). One of Miss Becker’s co-panellists at the launch was Virajah Ramaraj, the TBC’s program director. Ramraj, a veteran of an anti-LTTE paramilitary group, ENDLF, was arrested by Swiss police in March on long-standing criminal charges.

Ms Becker used a self-selecting sample for her March report. In other words, people who wanted to complain and who were linked into the network were invited. Ramaraj, also appears in Becker’s report, this time as a witness, rather than as a fellow author. The interviews had been conducted, in many cases, by long distance telephone calls to the UK and Canada.

The report accepts that the Metropolitan police in UK concluded in the face of specific complaints that there was no evidence of an offence. But Jo Becker went on to say that Scotland Yard turns a ‘blind eye’ due to political considerations. Adams reflected the same thinking when he insisted last week that for Diaspora witnesses, HRW (and not the local police force) was the ‘first place’ to which they could turn.

Yet Adams confessed that HRW did not have much knowledge of any of the local Diaspora communities. By extension, the organisations does not have the capability to assess the credibility or qualifications of its sources. To counter this failing, HRW contends that in many ways it does not matter: Adams says if even one person feels intimidated by LTTE fund raising strategies, then that is enough.

But this position has deep flaws. Lobbying for proscription of the LTTE (which is what HRW’s report does – successfully in Canada’s case) is to deny the expatriate Tamils their right to support the LTTE’s political project; politics. The politics of an entire community of respectable citizens is being tarnished by a select few associates of the likes of Ramaraj: the disregard for their views verging on the racist.

By ignoring ‘big picture’ analysis, Adams is holding on to a very simplistic view of truth. There are lies of distortion and lies of omission. HRW has indulged in both.

By focussing disproportionately on one human rights problem, others are marginalised. In the Sri Lankan conflict there are a plethora of abuses, including disappearances in government custody, torture, massive proportions of long term displaced, military occupation, arbitrary executions to name just a few.

HRW chose to prioritise a small group of people who unverifiably claim their rights are being violated over many of those who argue their rights are being defended against the Sri Lankan state by the LTTE. The point here is that HRW, when it writes on Sri Lankan affairs, even on a Diaspora issue, is intervening in the Sri Lankan conflict.

Even the merest respect for the numbers of rights abuses within the Sri Lankan question would have led to very different set of priorities from that chosen by HRW.

Almost a quarter of Tamils in Sri Lanka are internally displaced. Arbitrary, racially profiled, mass arrests of Tamils in cities such as Colombo are commonplace. So are cases of torture and disappearances.

In contrast to HRW, many of the Diaspora prioritise Sri Lanka’s rights abuses differently. Stopping the greatest abuser, the state military, is their concern. Many Diaspora Tamils argue for self-rule and autonomy on this basis and back the LTTE’s political struggle on this basis.

They are aware the LTTE does not have a clean sheet, but, in their view, this is not a concerning as securing the overall cause of self-determination which, when realised will protect Tamils from the Sri Lankan state.

Little surprise then that HRW has difficulty establishing credibility with the Diaspora: the human rights goals of the two groups may be broadly aligned in theory but in practice there is no agreement on implementation.

HRW enunciates human rights principles but are (at best) dangerously careless of the wider political impact of their work. The Diaspora on the other hand pursues the collective human rights of their community through the goal of self-determination and the LTTE.

For example, HRW deplored the impending exit of international truce monitors because with fewer people on the ground it would be harder to track human rights issues.

But the Diaspora saw the exit of the monitors as an inevitable consequence of their countries’ proscription of the LTTE. The Diaspora instead deplored the ban as a violation of their community’s human rights. They are also well aware HRW’s controversial (and now suspect) report contributed to the ban.

HRW deplored the large number of internally displaced people in the island. But Tamil Diaspora activists with organisations such as the TRO (Tamil Rehabilitation Organsiation) were furious because the ban also indirectly obstructed their humanitarian fund raising. Again, such activists see HRW as having targeted their struggle (in support of the Sri Lankan state that caused those displacements in the first place.)

HRW’s apparent recognition that the Diaspora matters to Sri Lankan politics comes somewhat late in the day. Notably, the Diaspora’s views were not consulted before the proscription of the LTTE - in fact all of the protests and appeals by the Diaspora were bluntly ignored. Instead, HRW’s report was cited as evidence for a need to save the Diaspora from the LTTE.

Ironically, Alston’s original metaphor of the parent-child is correct: the LTTE relies on the Diaspora for financial, intellectual and moral support.

But then it is impossible to seek a cooperative relationship with the parent having just helped in the demonising and condemnation of the child. If the organisers of last week’s meeting with the Diaspora were shocked by the anger they were met with, they had only themselves to blame.

It is not illegal to raise the Tamil Eelam flag in the United States, the US embassy in Colombo said last week. The embassy was responding to questions by Sri Lankan state media that a sports event organized in the United States weekend before last was a Tamil Tiger event as the Tamil Eelam flag had been raised there.

However, the Embassy’s press officer Evan Owen said that the US authorities couldn’t have prevented the Tamil sports festival in New York as there was no evidence to indicate the organisation behind this event had any links with the LTTE.

The Arts and Cultural branch of the World Tamil Organization in New York held its Ninth annual children’s sports festival at the Jamaica High School sports facilities in Jamaica New York Saturday July 30.

More than 200 children from Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx and New Jersey areas took part in the festival, organizers said.

The sports festival commenced with the lighting of flame of sacrifice, and the hoisting of US and Tamil Eelam national flags, and the flag of the Arts and Cultural Organization.

The Tiger symbol of Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam (LTTE) created in 1977 was designated as the National Flag of Tamileelam in 1990, without the letters inscribing the movement’s name. The Tiger flag became a civil flag in 1990.

“The LTTE remains to be listed as a foreign terrorist organisation. Any financial assistance or material aid to the LTTE is in violation to the US law,” the US embassy press officer said adding that however, the right to assemble and freedom of speech is upheld by their constitution.

Inquired about the Sunday Tamil schools and the matter that the curricular for these schools being sanctioned by an Education Board in Kilinochchi - the LTTE headquarters, he said “The US does not have a central education ministry controlling what is taught in school. It would be inappropriate for us to be screening material that has been taught.”

Diaspora parents have established a Tamil Education Board head quartered in Germany with members in other countries with significant Tamil population. This Board is responsible for drawing up curricula for teaching Tamil language and culture to diaspora children.

“Tamil books for Kindergarten to Grade 9 have already been developed that satisfy specific educational needs of diaspora children. These were drafted with expert guidance from University Professors in Tamil Language from South India, Singapore and Sri Lanka,” Mr Rajaratnam, a member of the Education Board from Canada told TamilNet.

“Although developed outside Sri Lanka, the books and the school curriculam were reviewed by the Tamileelam Education Board in Kilinochchi in 2004 and were approved,” Rajaratnam added.

The oddest bit of news last week was the tale of the hunt for Nelson Mandela’s pistol, buried on a farm near Johannesburg 43 years ago.

It was a Soviet-made Makarov automatic pistol, given to Mandela when he was undergoing military training in Ethiopia.

A week after he buried the gun, he was arrested by the apartheid regime’s police as a terrorist and jailed for life.

It’s hard now to imagine Mandela as a terrorist. He is the most universally admired living human being, almost a secular saint, and the idea that he had a gun and was prepared to shoot people just doesn’t fit our image of him. But that just shows how naïve and conflicted our attitudes toward terrorism are.

Mandela never did kill anybody personally. He spent the next 27 years in jail and only emerged as an old man to negotiate South Africa’s transition to democracy with the very regime that had jailed him.

But he was a founder and commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress, and MK, as it was known, was a terrorist outfit. Well, a revolutionary movement willing to use terrorist tactics, to be precise, but that kind of fine distinction is not permissible in polite company today.

There’s nothing unusual about all this. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and a dozen other national leaders emerged from prison to negotiate independence after ‘terrorist’ organizations loyal to them had worn down the imperial forces that occupied their countries.

In the era of decolonization, terrorism was a widely accepted technique for driving the occupiers out. South Africa was lucky to see so little of it, but terrorism was part of the struggle there too.

Terrorism is a tool, not an ideology. Its great attraction is that it offers small or weak groups a means of imposing great changes on their societies. Some of those changes you might support, even if you don’t like the chosen means; others you would detest.

But the technique itself is just one more way of effecting political change by violence — a nasty but relatively cheap way to force a society to change course, and not intrinsically a more wicked technique than dropping bombs on civilians from planes to make them change their behaviour.

What determines most people’s views about the legitimacy of terrorist violence is how they feel about the specific political context in which force is being used.

Most Irish Catholics felt at least a sneaking sympathy for the IRA’s attacks in Northern Ireland. Most non-white South Africans approved of MK’s attacks, even if they ran some slight risk of being hurt in them themselves.

Most Tamils both in Sri Lanka and elsewhere support the cause of the Tamil Tigers, and many accept its methods as necessary.

Americans understandably see all terrorist attacks on the U.S. and its forces overseas as irredeemably wicked, but most Arabs and many other Muslims are ambivalent about them, or even approve of them.

We may deplore these brutal truths, but we would be foolish to deny them. Yet, in much of the world at the moment, it is regarded as heretical or even obscene to say these things out loud, mainly because the United States, having suffered a major attack by Arab terrorists in 2001, has declared a “global war on terror.”

Rational discussion of why so many Arabs are willing to die in order to hurt the U.S. is suppressed by treating it as support for terrorism, and so the whole phenomenon comes to be seen by most people as irrational and inexplicable.

And meanwhile, on a former farm near Johannesburg that was long ago subdivided for suburban housing, they have torn down all the new houses and are systematically digging up the ground with a backhoe in search of the pistol that Saint Nelson Mandela, would-be terrorist leader, buried there in 1963.

If they find it, it will be treated with as much reverence as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The passage of time changes many things.

Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.

India last week politely but firmly made it clear to Sri Lanka that its security forces must stop killing innocent Tamils in the name of combating the Tamil Tigers.

Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera was conveyed the message by India’s political leadership which while being firmly committed to the island’s unity is bothered by increasing reports of attacks on innocent Tamils.

Political parties in Tamil Nadu are up in arms against the killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka. A string of protests took place in the state on June 19, organised by mainstream parties as well as Tamil nationalist groups.

Last Tuesday, the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s office issued a statement saying Singh had phoned Karunanidhi and told him that “appropriate steps” would be taken to restore peace in Sri Lanka.

Samaraweera, who flew in on Wednesday night from London on a previously unscheduled trip, first met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan exclusively and then had an extended meeting along with officials. Before flying to Colombo he met Minister of State for External Affairs E. Ahamed at the Indira Gandhi international airport.

India’s concern follows rapidly worsening situation in Sri Lanka where more than 800 people have been killed since December.

An informed source told Indo-Asian News Service: “[Smaraweera] was told that civilian casualties should be avoided... and we hope that Sri Lankan security forces will not respond to provocations and be restrained.”

The cycle of killings and counter-killings, for which blame has fallen on the security forces, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and anti-LTTE Tamil groups, has made a mockery of the 2002 Norway-brokered ceasefire between Colombo and the Tigers.
The violence has led to a panic run of distraught Tamil civilians to Tamil Nadu, the Indian state separated from Sri Lanka by a narrow strip of sea.

This in turn has generated a lot of heat in Tamil Nadu, where both the ruling DMK and opposition parties have pressed New Delhi to take steps to try to bring peace in the island nation.

A statement issued by the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and its allies had stated: “The Sri Lankan issue has already brought some unwanted disasters and the (central government) should ... take steps to bring peace in Sri Lanka.”

Former chief minister and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) leader Jayaram Jayalalitha has also expressed anguish over the “killing of innocent people in the fighting between the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE.”

She has demanded immediate action from the central government to bring peace to Sri Lanka.

Samaraweera, who was also in New Delhi last month, told Manmohan Singh that President Mahinda Rajapakse was committed to peace no matter what stand the LTTE took.

Samaraweera quoted Rajapakse as saying that “war is not an option” for Sri Lanka.

“We are committed to a political solution and want to go in for devolution of powers based on discussions at the all party conference (in Sri Lanka),” he told the Indian premier and Narayanan.

Colombo, the minister went on, wanted to talk to the LTTE to resolve the decades-long ethnic conflict. “For this government and for our president, war is not an option,” Samaraweera insisted.

Manmohan Singh heard out Samaraweera and expressed happiness over the minister’s assurances that Sri Lanka was not readying for war.

National Security Advisor Narayanan is expected to fly to Tamil Nadu shortly to appraise Chief Minister Muthuvel Karunanidhi about the discussions with Samaraweera.

Among other things Karunanidhi is seriously concerned over continuing attacks by Sri Lankan security forces on fishermen from Tamil Nadu.

Diplomats in Colombo fear that both Colombo and LTTE appear to be inching towards a full-fledged conflict although neither side wants to earn flak from the international community by provoking a war.

India follows the Sri Lanka situation closely and is in touch with Norway, which is engaged in desperate efforts to rescue the derailed peace process.

Sri Lanka’s Army-backed Tamil paramilitaries are seeking recruits amongst Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, offering hefty salaries, an Indian news agency reported this week.

The Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front (ENDLF), an India-based paramilitary group now operating in an anti-LTTE grouping under the Karuna Group, is seeking recruits from refugee camps and orphanages in southern India, tehelka.com reported, citing local press reports.

The recruitment is being conducted with the knowledge of India’s external intelligence agency, RAW (Research and Analysis Wing), tehlka.com added.

The ENDLF, reportedly headed by Paranthan Rajan, has been recruiting cadres for the Karuna Group (named after the renegade LTTE commander who heads it) from refugee camps in Tamil Nadu, telhelka.com quoted local press reports as saying.

New recruits were being offered Rs 10,000 on joining, with more promised when they reached Sri Lanka.

Rajan, a veteran paramilitary operating in India since 1990, has also been associated with an orphanage for Tamil refugees based in Bangalore, tehelka.com reported. One of the charges against him is that he sent some boys from the orphanage to participate in militant activities in Sri Lanka.

Rajan has contacts with several anti-LTTE groups, and he himself has been associated with several outfits, tehelka.com reported.

Originally a member of the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), Rajan left it to form Three Stars, along with dissidents from two other groups — Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO) and Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF).

In 1987, when the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) was in Sri Lanka, Rajan came into contact with RAW officials, who created ENDLF by merging Three Stars and splinter groups of PLOTE and EPRLF. In 1990, soon after the IPKF left Sri Lanka, Rajan, along with cadres of many other pro-Indian groups, shifted base to India. Rajan operated out of Chennai and Bangalore.

Rajan came to Indian intelligence officials’ attention when he joined Karuna’s group and formed a political outfit — Tamileela Iykkia Viduthalai Munnani. Given his background, observers feel Rajan’s alliance with Karuna might be RAW’s handiwork.

“Rajan’s unusually lengthy stay in India — he first arrived in India in 1990 — and his unrestricted movement here, coupled with his anti-LTTE activities on Indian soil, are seen as concrete proof that he is a RAW agent,” tehelka.com said.

The recently defeated Jayalalithaa government had arrested Rajan in 2004 – observers feel that he misread signals following Jayalalithaa’s crackdown on pro-LTTE groups in Tamil Nadu and felt he could have a free run with his anti-LTTE propaganda.

But he was released at the behest of RAW, tehelka.com said..

And Rajan was said to be once again active in Tamil Nadu, even though he had been deported last year on the condition that he would not return to India, tehelka.com said.

Sources told tehelka.com that Rajan landed in Bangalore a few weeks before the May 2006 Assembly elections and shifted to Tamil Nadu after the DMK came to power in May.

Police are not sure about Rajan’s present location. Asked if he might be holed up in some other Indian state like Orissa, where several pro-Indian militant leaders are believed to be hiding, an official told telhelka.com he could comment only on the situation in Tamil Nadu.

According to another Indian official, Rajan is currently in Batticaloa in Sri Lanka, which happens to be Karuna Group’s main area of operation.

The ENDLF is being used by RAW to as a rallying point of anti-LTTE groups, tehelka.com reported.

Rajan’s actions could have had RAW’s blessings as it might have had an interest in promoting Karuna and neutralising LTTE leader Vellupillai Pirapaharan’s appeal in Tamil Nadu, tehelka.com said.

In the wake of the April 2004 crushing of Karuna’s rebellion against the LTTE, Sri Lanka’s military has brought a number of paramilitary groups, including the ENDLF under one grouping to wage a campaign against the LTTE and its supporters.

ENDLF cadres based in India have been rotating into Sri Lanka’s Northeast on one-year visas issued by the Sri Lankan government to bolster the ‘shadow war.’

The covert war of attrition that has now escalated into a low-intensity war between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE – which has sent over three thousand people fleeing to southern India in the past few months.

Last week UNICEF finally “called for immediate action to halt the abduction and forced recruitment of children by the Karuuna group.” UNICEF’s gesture, although somewhat late in the day, is appreciated - as are all such moved by the plethora of international actors who take an interest in the Tamil situation. But the timing of UNICEF’s statement is noteworthy. For, like other Sri Lanka observers, UNICEF has known about the Army-backed Karuna Group’s forcible recruitment of teenagers for at least the fifteen months before its June 2006 statement.

In any case, in November 2005, the matter was directly raised by the Tamil Diaspora organisation, the International Federation of Tamils (IFT), which issued a press release unambiguously titled: “Sri Lankan Army accused of abduction and forced military training of children from army controlled Tamil areas.” It was based, moreover, on the personal accounts of three former child soldiers who had been kidnapped by Karuna Group paramilitaries and held in Sri Lanka Army camps in the east.

The IFT followed up its press release with a complaint to the UN’s Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children & Armed Conflict. The complaint was copied to UNICEF and the Coalition to Stop the use of child soldiers, among others. The youth, who had surrendered to the Liberation Tigers having deserted the paramilitaries when they were sent out on missions, are available for interview and cross examination.

But there was absolutely no interest whatsoever. Indeed, no response. The complaint wasn’t even acknowledged.

The lack of response was astonishing not least because the complaint was supported by examinable evidence. Moreover, the accusations were not new to Sri Lankans or the UN agencies. There had been reports and photographs in the Colombo press as far back as early 2005. On March 20, The Sunday Leader newspaper carried an article titled ‘Karuna camp in govt. controlled area.’ On the subject of child soldiers, the article said “(Sri Lankan) Military sources said that they believed that around 60 cadres operated out of Thivichchenei including under-aged cadres. While The Sunday Leader was at the village entrance, a youth who appeared to be around 12 years walked past carrying a firearm and ammunition.”

Amid reports that Tamil children in Sri Lanka Army controlled areas were being abducted or openly being seized by unidentified gunmen, the Liberation Tigers were repeatedly blamed. Not once did UNICEF acknowledge that anti-LTTE paramilitary groups operating in government controlled areas were responsible.

One would not normally expect a United Nations agency tasked with the protection of the interests of children to willingly turn a blind eye to the issue of child soldiers, particularly where the armed forces of a member government are allegedly involved.

But UNICEF said absolutely nothing on the subject of the Karuna Group’s use of child soliders until June 2006, over one year later. In the intervening period, as it had done in the past the agency continued to issue press releases blaming the LTTE, refusing to acknowledge the movement’s efforts to investigate and address complaints against it.

In fact, in the wake of Sri Lankan press reports of Karuna Group activities being stepped up in the east, UNICEF pointed a finger at the LTTE instead. “In June this year, there were 18 cases of child recruitment reported from the eastern Batticaloa region and in July so far we have received complaints of 28 cases in the same area,” Jeffrey Keele, UNICEF spokesperson, told the BBC in 2005. Batticaloa is, of course, where the Karuna Group is predominantly active.

The UNICEF statement was especially puzzling. To begin with, the LTTE, which had been negotiating on a tsunami aid-sharing mechanism, was said to be urgently seeking international legitimacy for their administration. It seemed contradictory that it would step up recruitment of under-18s at the same time.

From a pragmatic perspective, such moves defied logic. The Sri Lanka armed forces were recruiting heavily and acquiring weaponry from abroad. International actors were reiterating their support for the Colombo government. Could the forcible recruitment of a few dozen teenagers be the LTTE’s build up for a war?

And all this amidst persistent claims, both in the Sri Lankan media and by Tamil organisations, that Army-backed paramilitaries were responsible. This is not to deny that the LTTE has recruited fighters under the age of 18, but to ask why the movement was being singled out.

Some suggested that UNICEF was resorting to ‘bashing the Tiger’ in response to strong and understandable criticism from Sinhala rightwingers that its staffers, like those of other NGOs, were riding the gravy train in Sri Lanka. Indeed, Tamil aid workers had joined the chorus of protest at the enormous overheads that their international colleagues seemed to labour under. Amid reports of UN staffers living the high life in Colombo – even, it is alleged, barely days after the December 2004 tsunami, there were grumbles about the gleaming fleet of vehicles many INGOs race about the Northeast in.

Pique at the Tamil criticism and hope of ingratiating itself with strident Sinhala critics, some argue, were a key motivator in UNICEF’s Nelsonian approach to underage recruitment by the Karuna Group – which, as Sri Lanka watchers know, is a darling of the southern nationalist press.

The question here, is about UNICEF’s commitment to the principles enshrined in the ‘Rights of the Child.’ Many argue that the UN agencies – and many other NGOs – operate in a broad framework dedicated to preserving the status quo vis-à-vis states and non-state challengers. In short, that in Sri Lanka (and probably elsewhere), UNICEF is playing political football with the emotive and sensitive issue of children’s rights. Apart from its own local interests, UNICEF’s Tiger-bashing serves the wider geopolitical interests of key international actors.

UNICEF is not alone in this regard. Many ‘expert’ organisations involved in ‘promoting/defending child rights’ in Sri Lanka operate in a similar framework. Before going further, I am not denying the presence of under-18s in LTTE ranks – the movement itself regularly releases batches of under-age fighters and attempts to engage with UNICEF and other actors on the problem.

The point here is that all these efforts are ultimately futile, because none of the international actors are interested in the actual facts. An illustrative example is what happened when I recently met with a well known London-based international affairs think-tank. The Asia desk head – who is also a consultant to Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers – claimed expertise on Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers and on child soldiers in particular. But not only had she never been to the North or East, she had little hard data to back up her assertions against the LTTE. Simple questions as to how many under-18s were in LTTE ranks, of these how many were under-16s, how many were forcibly recruited, how many had joined out of poverty or after suffering violence by armed forces, how many were in combat units as opposed to civil administration, etc could not be answered. The point here is that these does not prevent this analyst from being an expert on ‘the LTTE and its use of child soldiers.’

There is also a key discrepancy that underscores the role UNICEF and the logic of child soldiers plays in reinforcing the international pro-state status quo. Not recruiting under-18s is supposed to be a universal standard of behaviour. But the UN applies different age standards to state and non-state armies. State armies can may not recruit persons under sixteen years, whereas non-state armies may not recruit below eighteen.

Of course, this has been criticised by some – and by no means all - those campaigning on child soldiers (indeed when asked for her views, the Asia Desk head tartly pointed out I should ask the UN that). But, by any standard, the criticism is mild compared to that levelled against organisations like the LTTE. Equally there is much readiness to accept government’s justification for breaching the ‘universal’ norm. One former UN staffer told me that when Britain was asked to explain its recruitment practices, her Ambassador simply declared that in British culture, there was nothing wrong with taking recruits in at the age of sixteen.

This ready acceptance of contextual peculiarities, however, does not extend to all actors. That there are a myriad reasons, both structurally underlying and immediately motivating, for which Tamil youth join the LTTE are irrelevant to those campaigning against the movement. There is a concomitant lack of interest in acquiring an understanding either. The experts are short on facts and numbers, but their views are emphatic. And in the international regime against child soldiers, that’s apparently not problematic.

To return to the silence over the Karuna Group’s forcible recruitment of children, international interests are at play here too. To begin, with Karuna is part of the ‘democratic’ alternatives that the international community insists the Tamils are backing. Given the repeatedly alleged link between the paramilitaries and the Sri Lankan armed forces, how could the United States stand emphatically behind an army complicit in the abduction and conscription of child soldiers? Just this week an Indian website ran a story that Tamil paramilitaries are recruiting children from refugee camps and orphanages in southern India – how are these recruits being moved into Sri Lanka without the knowledge of both governments?

The question, meanwhile, is what does all this mean for the ‘standard’ of not recruiting children?

The LTTE having agreed to comply with UN standards in the context of the peace process, finds itself frustrated by the deliberate refusal to recognise its efforts - it even gets blamed for the child recruitment by its enemy. Conversely, the paramilitaries, secure that their violations will be ignored as part of the wider objective of countering the LTTE, will continue their recruitment – last week, Tamil paramilitaries accompanied by Sri Lanka troops openly abducted over a hundred teenagers in a brazen breach of UN ‘standards.’

Against this backdrop one can speculate as to why UNICEF would link the Karuna Group and child soldiers now - as opposed to say November 2005 when Tamil activists were hammering on UN doors, and there was much more hope for the peace process. To begin with, the ultimate political sanction has been served on the LTTE – it has been proscribed by the European Union, leaving pretty much little by way of further political coercion. Yet the violence is not decreasing, but escalating.

Yet it is difficult to bring open pressure on the Sri Lankan state – in the wake of the EU ban, there is no longer much incentive for Colombo to reign in the paramilitaries or, for that matter, their armed forces. Frustration with Sri Lanka’s ability to play in step within a broader international framework to contain the LTTE, key international actors are starting to exert pressure. The sense – voiced by many sympathetic to the Sri Lankan government - that the Karuna Group and covert operations sections of the military are operating free of political authority may also be playing a role. Note the EU’s threat it is now considering proscribing the Karuna Group – apparently murdering a Tamil parliamentarian in Church at Christmas Mass was not quite reason enough.

On a concluding note, it must be remembered that UNICEF’s brief is not child soldiers alone, but the welfare of children. In this regard, UNICEF, whilst focusing on the thousand or so under-18s it says are in the LTTE’s ranks, has still not got around doing anything about the child rights issues faced by the many hundreds of thousand of Tamil children in the Northeast: a large population of children live in refugee camps, few schools function normally, many – particularly teenage girls - run a gauntlet of Sri Lankan troops every day.

But we shouldn’t expect this to change. It is simply not in the interests of UNICEF’s stakeholders right now. The ‘Rights of the Child’ is not a universal standard that is to be extended to the Tamils; it is merely a stick to beat them with when convenient.