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Two hoots about the 2002 truce
Ceasefire violations: Govt. vs. LTTE scorecard
By Chris Kamalendran
With the government and the LTTE expressing their commitment in Geneva on Thursday to continue to observe the February 2002 ceasefire agreement, the staggering number of truce violations in the past four years has cast a shadow over the monitoring task being carried out by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission.

As the ceasefire deal entered its fifth year on Wednesday—the day both the government and the LTTE sat at the negotiating table at the Swiss ecumenical resort, Château de Bossey, the monitoring mission consisting of Scandinavian observers has held that the LTTE has violated the agreement on more than 2,500 occasions while the government and its security forces are responsible for only 165 cases.

By the end of 2005, the SLMM had received 6,751 complaints against the LTTE and 1,313 against the government, according to the SLMM. The SLMM had ruled that the LTTE had not violated the ceasefire deal in 1,609 cases and the government side was cleared in 748 cases. Some 946 cases were pending before the SLMM by the end of 2005.

The majority of the complaints against the LTTE related to abductions and child recruitment. Last year alone, the SLMM received 222 complaints about abductions and 219 about child recruitment.

In 2002, there were 754 complaints about child recruitment against the LTTE, in 2003, the figure was 679 and in 2004 it was 456. Together with the 2005 figures, the total works out to 2,108 and the SLMM had ruled that the LTTE had violated the ceasefire agreement in 1,794 of these cases. However, a noticeable factor was that the number of complaints regarding child recruitment had gradually declined over the years.

In 2002, the SLMM received 320 complaints against the LTTE regarding abductions of adults and in the following year the figure was 350. In 2004 there were 314 complaints under this category and the figure for last year was 222.

There were also allegations that the LTTE had abducted children. The SLMM had recorded 318 such complaints by the end of 2005. However of the cases of abduction of adults and children only 784 were ruled by the SLMM as violations.

The other major complaints against the LTTE were about causing harassment to the people and disrupting normalcy. The main complaint against the security forces was that it was harassing the people. During the period under review, 461 such cases had been reported against the security forces.

Cases of assault, disrupting measures to restore normalcy and provocative acts were among the other complaints made against the security forces.

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