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A Sri Lankan Tamil rights group Saturday accused the LTTE of extensive conscription of children in eastern Sri Lanka. The University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR-Jaffna), in a special statement said, “Among the Tamil civilian population the dominant feeling is one of fear with little cause for hope.” “They, as the Government appears eager to do, may be handed over to fascist rule. In Batticaloa, the people are already having a dose of unbridled thuggery, where it is dangerous to appeal. The other prospect is their lives being rudely disrupted once more by a war of unprecedented severity, with their young as unwilling cannon fodder.” It said that the mounting problem of escaping conscripts makes a crucial mockery of the LTTE’s claim to be a people’s movement or the people’s sole representative. “Attempts to escape, results in “brutal punishment” and, in the case of a few, death by torture,” the UTHR report said. The LTTE had earlier promised the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, who visited Tiger held areas in 1998 not to recruit children below the age of 17 years and not to deploy children below 18 years as combatants. Olara Otunnu is due in Colombo next month.
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