Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Anuradhapura (Fides Service) - Nirmal is a Tamil boy. When he was 12 he saw his father killed in combat between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil separatist troops. The rebels gave the boy a gun telling him to take revenge for the death of his father. Nirmal was suffering from shock and those seeds of hatred and revenge soon began to grow in his heart. He was sent to a Liberation Tamil of Tamil Eelam LTTE military training camp near Jaffna, northern Sri Lanka for 18 months and was then sent, at the age of 13 and a half to the front line to shoot and kill and see the enemy and his companions die around him. He could not stand the life and managed to escape. Today he is 14 and he is one of 200 boys at the Don Bosco Training Centre run by the Salesians at Nochchiyagama, central Sri Lanka, in Anuradhapura diocese, a mainly Sinhalese region on the border with the Tamil majority zone. Two priests and three lay brothers work at the Centre directed by Salesian Father Anthony Pinto Humer, aged 47 who has been working to rehabilitate traumatised children, child soldiers, orphans, street children for the last 8 years.
“Many of the former child soldiers at our Centre - Father Pinto told Fides - tired of fighting surrendered to the regular army. The government, not knowing what to do with the boys, sent them to us. There are a lot of them so we decided to open a special Centre. We give them a home, schooling, professional training in crafts and mechanics to help them start a new life, but most of all we love them and we teach them to love to try to help them forget all the tragic memories of the past.»
Father Pinto said that since the beginning of the peace process in 2003, the number of the boys has grown: “They give themselves up, they run away: a first war seems like a game, but it soon violates their young lives violence, Boys of 11 and 12 anni, are manipulated, brainwashed, trained to kill. They are brutalised and treated like animals. Holding a gun may be fun at first but seeing people die inflicts wounds which are difficult to heal”.
Healing is the task of the people at the Centre: “When the children arrive they are frightened, silent, to scared to talk. They are suffering from physical and psychological trauma. Gradually they recover, they find new confidence and trust, and they go to school and are anxious to learn. They long to live a normal life again like any other child! Today they know that the real game is school. At our Centre Tamil and Sinhalese children, whose peoples are traditional enemies, live side by side. They are learning to know and love each other and this is important. As time goes by the older former child soldiers learn to be teachers of the younger ones: this is our peace process not at the negotiation table but in real life ”.
Father Pinto told Fides that some children are welcomed back by their families, others are rejected as traitors and deserters: “We hope soon to open more Centres in the north where most people are Tamil and where there are more child soldiers. But the situation is not safe enough yet. Our Centre in the Sinhalese area on the border with the Tamil region has the advantage of being able to help child soldiers of both ethnic groups and to teach them to love and respect each other. This is our mission, this is the challenge of the Church in Sri Lanka”.
Since the beginning of this year the LTTE rebels, who have fought twenty years of civil war, have released 60 boys. But according to UNICEF in 2003, despite the treaty signed with the central government in Colombo, LTTE recruited at least 700 minors. According to the London based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers; children are enlisted without the permission of their parents particularly in the districts of Batticaloa and Jaffna. But the LTTE affirms that because of poverty the boys ask to join the rebel army and that they are given only logistic and administration jobs.
UNICEF says that in 2003, while peace talks were going on with the government, the LTTE signed an Action Plan for Children Affected by War promising not to enlist minors and to take those still in its ranks to the nearest rehabilitation centres. While the government of Sri Lanka assigned 14 million dollars to help 50,000 child soldiers, orphaned, displaced children affected in some way by the war.
(PA) (Agenzia Fides 27/3/2004 lines 58 words 580)
