Whose truth? > A call to conscience > I will never talk to you again

It's a touchy subject, and Jeyaraj has lost some friendships because he's challenged Tamils who defend the use of child soldiers.

"One lady just walked out, said 'I will never talk to you again,' because her 13-year-old son was there. Maybe I laid it on too thick when the discussion was becoming very heated on this. I caught him, and said, 'If this fellow goes and gets killed or blown up, you will accept that?' That was too much for her to take, pointing to her son like that. She just stormed out.

"These are middle-class educated people with bigger aspirations for their children, but even the ordinary farmer and the fisherman, they also have their aspirations for their children, right?"

Jeyaraj recalls a passage from the Bible that his mother often used to repeat.

"I still remember what she said, the thing about the children, 'suffer the children to come unto me,' and look what we are doing to our children.

"That's why I'm disgusted with these guys."

He's so disgusted - with anonymous phone threats, stalled peace talks, child soldiers - that he's even thought of giving up on journalism as a futile exercise.

"Last May, I turned 50," he says. "It's a kind of magic day, it led to introspective thinking and I felt sick. I'm 50 now. Am I going to spend the rest of my life writing about these [people]? So I stopped writing, but now I'm writing about them again."

Disgusted as he is about the movement's use of child soldiers and suicide killings, Jeyaraj still sympathizes with the movement's goal of a separate Tamil state.

Even today, Jeyaraj says he would vote for the Tamil Tigers if they became a democratic political party. Writing critically about the movement is the only way he knows to rescue it.

"Speak truth to power," he says. "Even though I'm not much of a churchgoer, I have deep principles. Maybe this is too fanciful, but there is a prophetic tradition, the prophets are not part of the state, materially they are not rich, but they go and have the courage to tell the king where he goes wrong. Even in Tamil literature, there is that a good king needs critical counsel."

And more than ever, Jeyaraj believes the independence movement in Sri Lanka - and the Toronto Tamils who support it - need to be called to account.

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