UN General Assembly
1998

children. While we are conscious of the tragic incidence of child prostitution and pornography in our country, we have also traced the insidious international linkages which aggravate the problem further. We urge the international community to tighten laws and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that those responsible for such heinous crimes will not receive refuge anywhere. A particularly cruel offence against the innocence of children is their forced recruitment by a terrorist group in Sri Lanka to serve as suicide killers in the name of a cause they are too young even to comprehend. This is just one sordid aspect of the activities of a terrorist group known as the Tamil Tigers — or the LTTE. They seek to dismember Sri Lanka, with the objective of creating in our land a monoethnic and racist entity — an objective totally unacceptable to the overwhelming majority in the country and even to the very community whose cause the LTTE claims to represent. We believe that ethnic grievances exist in Sri Lanka. I said so in my address to the nation at the fiftieth