By Ananth Palakidnar

The young men in the North and East face imminent danger of being recruited as mercenaries to engage in the ongoing battle between Russia and Ukraine.

A mother of a youngster from Jaffna has made a fervent appeal at the Police station in Jaffna to rescue her son from those who had took her son and several other young men forcibly and made them to join the Russian army currently engaged in the fight against Ukraine for the past two years.

Six young men including a father of three children have been duped by a bogus travel agent who was found to be recruiting young men from the North and East in a clandestine manner to be mercenaries in the the Russian Army.

Following the complaints made to the Jaffna Police by the parents of the young men who are in their mid-twenties, the matter has been brought to the notice of the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry.

Six young men, had paid six million Sri Lankan rupees to their travel agent who had promised to take them to France. However the travel agent had disembarked them at the Moscow Air Port and told them they had to travel to France via Russia.

At the Moscow Air Port, a Russian had collected the six Jaffna men and taken them forcibly to a Russian Army camp where they were given fifteen days of tough military training.

The plight of these young Jaffna men has been revealed by Gomez Raja Mithurshan who is one of the victims. He had sent his picture in military uniform in a letter detailing their plight, written to his mother in Gurunagar Jaffna.

The six men are from Mullaithivu, Nelliyadi and Jaffna from the Northern Province and they were duped and flown to Russia by a bogus travel agent who had promised to take them to France.

According to sources from Jaffna, the bogus travel agents are operating in a crafty manner by dealing with the middlemen helping the Russian Army to get young men from Asian countries and on the other hand getting money from the young men from North and East, posing to them as travel agents helping them to reach various European destinations.

Parents of the six young Jaffna men from Karavetty, Mulliyawalai and Jaffna have lodged a complaint with the local Police.  They have also met the Governor of Northern Province, N. Vethanayakam and sought his assistance to bring back their sons from Russia.

Following the request made by the parents of the six young men who have been duped and put to fight alongside with the Russian Army against Ukraine, the Governor of the Northern Province immediately contacted the Secretary to the Foreign Ministry and explained the plight of the parents who want their sons back from war-torn Eastern Europe.

In the meantime, several organisations in the North have alerted the people to be extremely cautious about foreign job seeking via travel agents who operate in a clandestine manner to mislead the young men for their ulterior motives.

The North and East have a long history of this. There has been a mass exodus of young men from these provinces, beginning in the early eighties, following the escalation of the ethnic conflict and the consequent civil war which lasted for decades.  

To escape from forced conscription by various Tamil militant groups and to escape from the intensity of the turbulent war, young men in their thousands fled to various West European and Scandinavian countries as well as to America, Canada and Australia.

These countries all provided refugee status to those fleeing our shores in war and many benefited by it.

In the past forty years, thousands of people from North and East have become citizens in the countries they have domiciled in; a large number of mixed marriages have also taken place between the men from Jaffna and the young women in Europe.
However not everyone successfully won citizenship rights.

A well-informed source said that in Europe there are still a large number of men from the North and East awaiting to get permanent citizenship whereas others didn’t have proper jobs or shelter to lead their lives. Therefore, there is a tendency for these men to become easy targets of human traffickers, trafficking them across the world for various nefarious purposes.

On the other hand, those who had migrated to Europe in the early eighties and established themselves in various business activities also use the asylum seekers from the North and East with meager payments.

Thus the complaints lodged to the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry through the Jaffna Police by the latest batch of trafficked men who have ended up in conscripted in the Russia-Ukraine war has highlighted the manner human smugglers operate in various ways.

Usually, many of these stories are hidden from the community back home. Since this latest batch have ended up in a particularly dangerous war situation and their families are desperate to get them out of there, the news has surfaced.

Human trafficking is a long ongoing problem in the North and East without adequate measures by the government, the media or the communities themselves thus far to raise awareness on the issue or curtail it adequately.
It’s a deep rooted problem that needs to be addressed by various stakeholders on multiple fronts in order to resolve.
The war that drove most of the youths out of the North and East is finally over. But economic hardships remain which needs to be addressed as well. Alongside lack of awareness on the dangers of human trafficking.