REBELS WITHOUT A CHILDHOOD.

• Author: Dugger, Celia W.
• Position: Children recruited by the Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka

IN SRI LANKA, REBELS ARE SENDING CHILDREN TO THE BATTLEFRONT TO FIGHT THEIR CIVIL WAR

Renuka, a 13-year-old wisp of a girl, says she is afraid she will be scolded because she chose not to swallow her cyanide capsule.

Recruited at age 11 by ethnic Tamil rebels to fight for a separate state, she was lying wounded on the front lines of Sri Lanka's civil war, surrounded by the blasted bodies of three other insurgents who were on duty with her when mortar fire hit their sentry post.

But rather than kill herself to avoid capture, as her superiors in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had ordered, Renuka bandaged her bloody chest and waited to be picked up by the Sri Lankan army. "I didn't want to die," she says in a thin, quavering voice at an army detention camp in Palali. "And I'm not going back to the LTTE. They will threaten me and scold me and ask why I didn't take the cyanide."

Two years ago, the Tigers met with a United Nations official attempting to halt the use of some 300,000 child soldiers worldwide. (See "Children of War") The LTTE promised they would stop recruiting children under 17 and sending anyone under age 18 into battle. But evidence from the recent carnage in Sri Lanka's 17-year war with the rebels strongly suggests that the Tigers have continued using children in their battle to win a homeland for the mostly Hindu Tamil minority in the north and east of the country. After one recent battle, 6 of the 36 dead rebels whose bodies were picked up by the Sri Lankan army appear to have been girls between the ages of 12 and 16, according to an international official who inspected them.

The United States has classified the Tigers as a terrorist organization, but Canada and Great Britain, with substantial Tamil communities, have not banned the group, which raises money from the nearly 1 million Sri Lankan Tamils living abroad.

AN ESCAPE FROM POVERTY

Renuka now wants nothing more to do with the rebels. (UPFRONT is withholding her last name out of concern that the rebels would punish her for turning against them.) Starting when she was in the sixth grade, Tiger soldiers came to her school every month on recruiting drives, with men and women in battle fatigues telling the students it was their duty to join the Tigers to help save the Tamil people from the Sri Lankan army. One day, when she was in seventh grade, Renuka told her parents she was going shopping, but instead went to a Tiger camp. She was hungry, she says, "and we all...