A fortified jungle outpost. Machine gun fire and rocket propelled grenades spew from the slit windows of a concrete blockhouse as the fortress's Defenders come under relentless attack.
Surging from the jungle, wave after wave of troops charge headlong through tall elephant grass that rises above their shoulders. They struggle to aim and fire AK-47's that are almost as large and heavy as they are. The attackers are Children and the fortress Defenders cut their tiny bodies to pieces...
This isn't fiction. It's a brief description of the Battle of Elephant Pass, which occurred in Northern Sri Lanka in 1991, lasted 4 days and involved more than 10,000 combatants.
The attacking army was "The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam"(LTTE). They lost the battle and left 573 dead child soldiers on the battlefield, some as young as 4 years old.
The use of Child soldiers is one of the most repugnant aspects of modern warfare. Around the world, hundreds of thousands of children are abducted from their families, abused until compliant and turned into killers. They are literally cannon fodder. Disposable. Dispensable. Never missed or mourned by their commanders.
The war in Sri Lanka has been going on for more than 20 years, with the Tamil Tigers credited for not only inventing suicide bombing, but for abducting thousands of children in the tiny island nation to act as soldiers in units the Tigers themselves have dubbed "Baby Brigades".
If it were possible to make this practise even more disturbing, the LTTE has done that too, now owning and operating orphanages where the children placed in their care are trained for special combat units called "Leopard Brigades" or their "Black Tiger" suicide squads.
And they've done all of these things with money raised in Canada (mostly within 25 miles of my own home) while Liberal Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin repeatedly refused to place them on any list of banned terrorist groups.
As the LTTE assassinated heads of government, massacred hundreds in rural villages, engaged in human smuggling, arms smuggling, Tsunami relief fund theft, piracy and massive extortion in immigrant communities abroad; the USA, India, Australia, Great Britain and 27 countries in the European Union outlawed their activities, jailed their enablers and froze their assets.
In Canada, the ruling Liberals did nothing, not wanting to "upset" Tamil residents who account for 100,000 votes in Federal ridings East and North of Toronto. And you don't have to take my word for that.
While the RCMP investigated "intimidation and extortion" of Tamil Canadians to secure funding for the Tigers, an FBI report designated Canada as a major source of illegal funding to the Tigers because "The federal Liberal Government, in an effort to bolster support in the Tamil community, refuses to declassify the Tigers as a terrorist group despite several recommendations from CSIS to do so."
Last year, the new government of Stephen Harper followed the rest of the International community and declared the LTTE a terrorist organization. The RCMP raided their fund raising charity fronts in Toronto and Montreal while police arrested several involved in arms smuggling.
Last Friday, the Sri Lankan Air Force killed LTTE Brigadier S.P. Thamilselvan, deputy leader of the Tigers. On Monday night, not far from where I live, 10,000 Tamils gathered to mourn his loss, joining them and speaking from the stage were 9 federal Liberal members of parliament.
The MP's said they were there "to urge for peace" and have been praising the dead Tiger leader as a "peacemaker" despite his well publicized (and self-acknowledged) record of hundreds of atrocities and have denied that the Tigers are involved in extorting their constituents and are anything but terrorists.
That would seem to fly in the face of reams of evidence supplied by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UNICEF, Interpol, the FBI and CSIS.
Yesterday, I heard MP Jim Karygiannis deny that there was any evidence of Tamils in Canada being threatened, abused or forced to pay money to support the Tigers. That would mean that he's unaware of the letter sent to members of parliament and the Toronto Police Chief 11 months ago by Human Rights Watch which outlined just such practices.
He also apparently missed the CBC story from a year earlier that outlined the door-to-door fundraising where Tamil families were given Pin numbers for donations. Numbers they would need to enter certain districts in Sri Lanka when they returned for visits. Numbers which would also assure the safety of relatives still living there.
And I guess he was busy in June of 2000 when 400 Sri Lankans marched on Parliament Hill urging the Liberal government to crackdown on fund-raising by the Tigers that had Tamil neighbourhoods living in fear.
In protecting their political backsides, these politicians protect killers, not only breaking the laws of this country by "associating with a banned terrorist organization", but contributing to untold suffering and bloodshed half a world away -- much of it by children whose innocence has been traded for inhumanity.
According to Human Rights Watch and UNICEF, the Tamil Tigers abducted 5,666 children between 2001 and 2006, although they speculate only 1/3 of cases are actually reported to them.
The report also states that these Children were used for "massive frontal assaults" like Elephant Pass and that boys and girls 12-14 were used to massacre women and children in remote rural villages. Children as young as 10 are used as suicide bombers and assassins, the Tigers preferring girls and young women because they are less likely to be searched for explosives by security forces.
And if this isn't sinking low enough, LTTE child soldiers are provided with cyanide capsules and grenades and instructed to take their own lives to avoid capture.
There's an adage that the only thing required for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing and another about the banality of evil.
The nine Liberal Members of Parliament pictured below certainly exemplify the banality of evil.
In descending order, they are:
John Cannis -- Mark Holland -- Jim Karygiannis -- Derek Lee -- John McKay -- Maria Minna -- Yasmin Ratansi -- Lui Temelkovski -- Borys Wrzesnewskyj...
Despite their stance as peacemakers, supporters of "freedom fighters" or however else they rationalize their behaviour -- nothing can justify defending those who twist children into killers and assassins or walking bomb delivery units.
I honestly hope there's some way they can be punished for their support of the purveyors of terror. Maybe our anti-terror laws actually have some teeth. Maybe American Homeland Security can put them on some no-fly list. Perhaps the decent people in their constituencies have other ways to take them to task for the terrible acts they've assisted by their desire to hold a seat in Parliament.
How do these people sleep? Just how much can a vote really be worth?
