SRI LANKA: Over 600 war children still missing

Photo: Amantha Perera/IRIN

Kulasekran has been looking for her son for three years

VAVUNIYA, 1 August 2011 (IRIN) - More than two years after Sri Lanka's decades-long conflict officially ended, the whereabouts of 630 children are unknown, according to a government database.

Most went missing during the final phase of the war that ended on 18 May 2009, when government forces declared victory over the now defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who had been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland since 1983.

According to reports cited by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), 64 percent of those missing were recruited by the LTTE while 30 percent were last seen behind government lines.

During the last phase of the war, more than 300,000 civilians were displaced from areas once under Tiger control, popularly known as the Vanni.

When they poured into camps set up in Vavuniya, just outside the theatre of fighting, many parents were desperate to find their children.

"There were women crying outside my office, asking me to find their children," Piencia Charles, the most senior government official in the Vavuniya District, told IRIN.

In December 2009, Charles set up the Family Tracing Unit within the Vavuniya Divisional Secretariat.

"It's something I felt I had to do. There was no mechanism in place to search for these kids. The parents were in so much pain," she said.         Full Story>>>
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Is This Ban's 'Never Again' Moment?

Posted: 1/8/11

Edward Mortimer

Chair of the Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice

  We failed to prevent a massacre in Sri Lanka. We must not fail to seek justice for it.

'Never again' is the promise that has followed the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda and Srebrenica; issued each time with outrage and contrition, and, in recent years, a report on the failure of the international community to act. Kofi Annan commissioned one such report in 1999 on the Rwandan genocide, declaring: "Of all my aims as [UN] Secretary-General, there is none to which I feel more deeply committed than that of enabling the UN never again to fail in protecting a civilian population". Less than five years later, the UN was unable to galvanise international action in Darfur. Ten years later it failed to prevent tragedy unfolding in the final stages of Sri Lanka's long-running civil war.      Full Story>>>