Tears for children

Friday 14th October, 2022

One cannot but agree with President Ranil Wickremesinghe that children must not be involved in public protests. He has called for a ban on this despicable practice, and he can rest assured that all right-thinking Sri Lankans who are concerned about children’s safety are with him. Some parents have been seen carrying their children at anti-government protests during the past several months; they have done something similar to what the LTTE did, the President has said; one could not agree with him more on this score as well. Stringent action is called for against those who expose children to danger.

The JVP also has a history of using children in protests and endangering their lives. In the late 1980s, it made even preschool children protest against the 13th Amendment and the Provincial Councils. The tiny tots could not say palath saba (provincial councils) and they were heard calling them pala baba (‘green leaves baby’) instead. The JVP also used schoolchildren to deliver ‘chits’ ordering the closure of shops, and put up posters, and some of them perished in counterterror operations. Skeletal remains of more than a dozen schoolchildren killed by the military for their involvement in JVP activities were found in a mass grave at the summit of Suriya Kanda, which has since come to be dubbed the ‘Mountain of Death’.

Ironically, no sooner had President Wickremesinghe condemned the use of children in protests than he appointed Erik Solheim as his international climate advisor. Solheim, one may recall, made no bones about his partiality towards the LTTE during the war despite the crimes the latter committed against children belonging to all communities as well as others. The LTTE forcibly recruited Tamil children in the North and the East and used them as cannon fodder; it also turned them into suicide bombers and called them ‘children of fire’ while massacring hundreds of Sinhala and Muslim children elsewhere. The UNP-led UNF government (2001-2004) had no qualms about giving the LTTE kid-glove treatment at the behest of Solheim and other Norwegians, who got Wickremesinghe, who was the Prime Minister at the time, to sign a ceasefire agreement with the LTTE, in 2001, despite Prabhakaran’s heinous crimes against children and others. The laxity of that administration was reprehensible.

Mahinda Rajapaksa will vouch for the fact that when he was the President, Solheim as the Norwegian special peace envoy, strove to discourage him from continuing military operations against the LTTE; the latter even claimed that Prabhakaran was a brilliant military strategist and could not be defeated. Today, Solheim is an advisor to the Rajapaksa-Wickremesinghe government, which is also cosying up to pro-LTTE groups that funded Prabhakaran’s war, while threatening tough action against the parents who bring their children to anti-government protests!

Solheim obviously gave the Sri Lankan governments the wrong advice during the war, and if President Rajapaksa had listened to him and stopped the war, crimes such as the forcible child conscription and massacres of children would have continued. One can only hope that Solheim will not mislead the Sri Lankan leaders on climate issues.

Now that the government has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the children involved in protests and exposed to danger, will it reveal how it proposes to tackle other issues affecting them. It has ruined their future by bankrupting the economy. Many children are starving as their parents have lost their livelihoods due to the current economic crisis. Students faint in schools, and malnutrition among them is on the rise. Children’s hospitals are experiencing various shortages. Instead of making a serious effort to look after their nutritional needs, the government is tilting at windmills.Government politicians and their progeny are living in clover at the expense of the ordinary people, who are undergoing untold hardships for no fault of theirs. The best way they can serve the interests of the ordinary children, whom they are shedding copious tears for, is to return the public funds they have systematically stolen over the years, and stashed away in offshore accounts.