A 14-year-old student of Yarltan College in Kaarainakar, Jaffna, Thiruchelvan Kajeethan, who was enticed by the EPDP and taken to Colombo to participate in the anti-UN panel report demonstration that took place on May Day, is so far missing. The parents of the grade-6 student, disappointed in getting a reply from the EPDP have approached TNA parliamentarians in Jaffna to find out what had happened to the boy. In recent times, there are many instances of school children, below the age of sixteen, missing in the country of Eezham Tamils.
Kajeethan, coming from Maruthang-ku’lam locality of Kaarainakar Island off the Jaffna peninsula was taken by the EPDP to Colombo without the knowledge of his parents.
The parents of the boy had also directly approached Mr. Douglas Devananda, the leader of the EPDP, to know the whereabouts of their child, but they didn’t get any reply.
The EPDP has taken many of its supporters from Jaffna to participate in the anti-UN panel report demonstration convened by SL president Mahinda Rajapaksa in Colombo on the May Day.
There is a widespread fear whether the missing children of the Tamil country are inducted into any of the paramilitaries or sold as child labourers and sex workers in the south.
In Batticaloa, a 11-year-old student of Chiththaa’ndi Maha Viththiyaalayam, Ramachandran Mariyaraj, was abducted and sold to a Sinhala gang in Dambulla that deployed the boy into child labour in May 2011. The grandfather of the boy, Velmurugu Sivalingam, who managed to trace and rescue the boy from the grips of ‘treasure hunters’ was later subjected to threats.
There have been cases of men in military uniform abducting boys and taking them towards South through Vavuniyaa from Vanni.
In Colombo, a 16-year-old Tamil girl from Mullaiththeevu, who ran away from the National Hospital in Colombo, where she had been warded for an operation to prevent pregnancy after being forced into prostitution, led the police and the officials of the Colombo-based National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) to rescue eight girls. Six of the girls, between the age of 16 and 24, were from the Tamil country, who were exploited as prostitutes locked inside a room.
Tamil human rights activists say that the structural violence is systematically committed with genocidal mentality.