As I am eating, I turn on the television on and the news is about my homeland and the war going on there. The war is between the Sri Lankan Army and The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). There is video of artillery firing, of people leaving their houses and looking for refuge. The people live and hide under trees and by the side of the road.
Now the time is 07:15. I need to get the tube. I buy a weekly travelcard and step onto the Central line train. I am reading the Metro and there is more news about wars in many different countries. There is also a table showing which countries have the most child soldiers. Sri Lanka is in 18th place. I think about my friend Joe, who became as a member of the Tamil Tigers.
My friend Joe. When he was 11 yeas old, he joined up with the LTTE and got full military training in six months. He lead other child soldiers into battle against the army. On a few occasions he returned to base. He was very popular and perhaps some people in the LTTE did not like him doing so well at that age.
Somebody informed on him. They told the army what he had planned. Joe was barely 12 when he was captured. He tried to to kill himself by swallowing a cynide capsule he wore on a chain around his neck, but the soldiers managed to shoot him in the hands before he could do so.
They captured him instead of killing him in order to get more information about the LTTE. I don’t know exactly how they tortured Joe, but my mother has told me that the army torturers hammer nails into peoples’ heads. They rip out their finger nails. They use electric shocks and they tie people up to big blocks of ice and kick them and beat them with lathis.
I suddenly see where am I. I have gone past two stations. I get off at the next station and and then change platforms. I am taking the train to Bank. I pick up the paper and, again, start thinking about my friend and what eventually happened to him.
After the torture they didn't give him any treatment for the bullet holes in his hands. But once I saw him. I saw as he went past in an army van. They were talking him somewhere. I told his parents that he was still alive, but I haven’t seen him since. Two years later he was released because of his youth, but now he is unwell.
I feel badly about being a refugee and when I think about my friends and all the other people who are refugees, including my family and my friends, and all the people who speak my mother tongue, that's when I realise we have all been affected by war.
I didn't like the LTTE after the 2002, because they overreacted to government and army oppression and they did some bad things. But I didn't want them to lose either.
Above all, I don't like one thing that the LTTE did. They took children and forced them to fight for them. My cousin was forced to join, even though she was a girl. She was only seventeen when they took her. Her father passed away because of an accident before she could see him again. Her mother and two sisters were very unhappy and suffered a lot because of this. She was given military training and they cut her hair so that she could be easily identified as an LTTE fighter and wouldn't leave them.
Her family gave the Tigers lots of money. My cousin is now in jail because she was a soldier. I hope she will come out soon and will be happy with her family in future.
Rajah Sevageganesan
Comments
Your words reminded me of the time when I worked with a Sri Lanken man who I got on very well with. He told me many sad tales of the racist abuse he had received while working at a petrol station in london (in Hammersmith i think). He had been a teacher in Sri Lanka and had been respected, to find himself the recipient of racist abuse and thuggish behaviour had been a sickening shock. He thought he had left the violence behind.