hi guys!
this article is from december 2009 but i thought it was really relevant to our discussion. it’s about former child soldiers of the LTTE and how the government is providing an education and vocational training for them to basically help them reintegrate into society and contribute. courses are taught in Tamil rather than Sinhala, so these children are getting an awesome opportunity at an education that they might not have had before. this sounded like a great idea to me, but there are a ton of criticisms that come along with it. the most prominent one was that this was just a propaganda move on the part of the sri lankan government;
“The government wants to showcase this to the international community and to the media. It wants to create an impression that other camps are run on the same lines. Sri Lanka’s government is keeping over 10,000 suspected LTTE members in various camps. International organisations are not given any access to these camps…”
here’s the link to the article if you want to read it! i thought it was really interesting.
-shaheen
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