KEY POINTS:
Two children stand on the roadside staring into the thick darkness of a banana plantation, their slender shoulders drooping from the weight of ammunition around their necks. Their eyes betray unadulterated terror, and the younger one, no more than 13, looks close to tears.
Towards the jungle, across
from the bleak strip of peninsula that separates the town of Batticaloa from the Sri Lanka mainland, comes the penetrating thud of shells from government field-guns.
As each shell falls, the children, cadres from the Karuna Faction, a breakaway militia which split from the Tamil Tigers two years ago, nervously twitch their fingers on the triggers of AK47s.
The Karuna Faction are now in the middle of a brutal struggle against their former comrades in the Tamil Tigers, a situation the Sri Lankan Army is well placed to exploit. But the three-way battle is causing untold misery in and around Batticaloa.
Army trucks hurtle past the children standing guard, heading towards positions in the west and north.
Across from a heavily guarded checkpoint, Vijay Lakshmi, 52, sits in a refugee camp surrounded by 27 members of her family. The sound of fighting in the distance is coming from the Sittnadikudi district, where she once lived.
For her and an estimated 196,000 others around Batticaloa, including the 12,000 people who share this camp, home is now a white United Nations tent.
Her children and grandchildren are fed sparse rations of rice in a communal kitchen. The World Food Programme fears it will run out of rations for the refugees within a month.
This remote eastern corner of one of the world's most beautiful tourist destinations has become the centre of a humanitarian crisis both the UN and the International Red Cross say is fast rivalling that in Darfur. As in the Sudan, the forced recruitment of children is at the heart of the crisis.
"The Government is shelling our land each day, the Tamil Tigers are looting everything and the Karuna Faction are abducting our children," Ms Lakshmi says.
A fortnight ago Ms Lakshmi's eldest nephew, Rajnish, 15, was dumped in a paddy field. His neck had been broken and his groin peppered with bullets. A pro-Tamil Tigers pamphlet had been stuffed in his mouth. His crime had been manning a Karuna Faction checkpoint. He had been "recruited" at gunpoint four months earlier.
He was one of a growing number of child military victims of a bloody war being fought through thick jungle between Government troops, Government-backed Tamil fighters led by Commander Karuna, and battle-hardened guerrillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Karuna is the nom de guerre of 42-year-old Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, a widely feared guerrilla. Until two years ago he was the Tigers' military commander. Hailing from a small village near Batticaloa, he broke away from the Tigers, saying the eastern Tamils were dying in disproportionate numbers for the northern leadership.
Both Tamil factions claim to be fighting for a state for the three million Tamils on the Indian Ocean island where the 20 million population is dominated by Sinhalese people.
In Batticaloa, the two groups vie for control, using abductions and political assassinations to enforce their rule. Although these rivals were once on the same side - fighting the Sri Lankan Army for 20 years in a conflict that has claimed 65,000 lives, including 4000 in the past eight months - they are now sworn enemies. It is a widely held suspicion that Karuna and his troops are now sheltered by his former arch enemy, the Sri Lankan Army.
Those suffering the most are the children and parents caught in the middle.
With its poverty, ethnically-mixed population and fluid lines of control between the Government and Tamil rebels, the east coast of Sri Lanka is known for its volatility.
Stories of child abductions by the guerrillas are common. "Children and the destruction of family life are at the centre of the epic tragedy you see here," say Human Rights Watch campaigners, who accuse the Sri Lankan Government of complicity in the abduction of minors by refusing to stop child recruitment by the Karuna rebel group.
Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said: "It's a shame that Government forces complicit with the Karuna group are now involved in the same ugly practice [as the LTTE]. There is strong evidence that government forces are now openly co-operating with the Karuna group despite its illegal activities."
Children under the age of 14 can be seen standing guard and Sri Lankan soldiers and police walk past the armed children without taking action.
Reliance by the LTTE and Karuna factions on children as frontline warriors in Sri Lanka's 20-year civil war has long been a stain on their international reputation. Agencies, including the island's peace monitors, have said that boys and girls as young as 11 have been recruited as fighters - many abducted from their homes, and that children make up more than 20 per cent of the rival forces.
The fears of the Karuna Faction child soldiers looking into the jungle are understandable.
The Tamil Tigers have carefully nurtured their deadly mystique. Every Tamil guerrilla fighter carries a cyanide suicide capsule the day he or she is accepted into the Tigers' military ranks - to take if captured alive.
Suicide bombings by an elite unit known as the Black Tigers are still at the heart of the Tigers' effectiveness as guerrilla fighters.
For the Tamil Tigers there is none of the talk of a guaranteed place in heaven for martyrs, such as espoused by Muslim suicide bombers.
The Tigers are not religious and believe that there is nothing after death. Their fanaticism is borne of indoctrination from childhood.
The estimated 4000 Tiger cadres embedded around Batticaloa, about half of whom are women, have emerged as a compact attacking force using the strategy of highly mobile conventional armies favoured by the world's most advanced countries.
For most of their history, the Tigers, led by their reclusive leader, Prabhakaran, have demanded an independent homeland carved out of the north and east of Sri Lanka.
Prabhakaran's argument is simple: the Tamils, who make up 12.5 per cent of Sri Lanka's population, cannot live together in peace with the majority Sinhalese. A separate state, Eelam, is necessary in the Tamil heartland of northern and eastern Sri Lanka.
Government security forces have detained hundreds of people during sweeps of Tamil residential areas in Colombo.
Many have been freed days or weeks later without charge, and rights lawyers say there is a culture of impunity that gives the military and police free rein to detain anyone they want.
K.S. Ratnavale, a lawyer who handles detention cases and who is director of the Centre for Human Rights and Development, said: "East, south or north, if you are a Tamil you can expect to be terrorised from all sides, the people who govern you and the people who claim to fight for your freedom."
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