Wednesday, June 13, 2007

AL JAZEERA: Sri Lanka war claims civilian lives



First of all, I should mention that I’m not really interested in posting political and ethnic stuff. But a couple of days ago while I was browsing channels on Cable TV, I came across this interesting programme about Sri Lanka on Al Jazeera. This documentary mainly focused on Sri Lanka’s never ending conflict and children that abducted by Tamil Ealam and other unknown gangs. It’s really got me thinking how outsiders may look at our country. And when I logged onto the net this morning the particular report was all over the Sri Lankan news portals. So I thought of sharing it with you. Here’s the exact report which was later posted on Al Jazeera’s official website...

Al Jazeera:
Sri Lanka's ongoing conflict, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives, has seen an increasing number of civilian disappearances. The government and the Tamil Tigers blame each other.

Al Jazeera's Tony Birtley reports from Sri Lanka, where human rights groups say more than a thousand people have either vanished or been abducted in the past year alone, most of them Tamils.

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 Ealam. The girls say they were forced to fight for the Tigers.

"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."

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.

Tony Birtley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQZVyFqKdmo

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