The UN agency for children on Tuesday opened fresh talks with Tamil Tiger rebels on children affected by Sri Lanka’s drawn out ethnic conflict and efforts to demobilise child soldiers, officials said.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) representative here, Ted Chaiban, travelled to the rebel-held town of Kilinochchi in northern Sri Lanka for the discussions, officials said.
The talks are a follow up to a visit here last month by Unicef’s executive director Carol Bellamy who said the Tigers were continuing to recruit children to their armed units despite promises to give up the practice.
”The LTTE and Unicef will discuss the broad issue of children affected by the armed conflict,” an official source here said. Both the LTTE and the government agreed in their fifth round of peace talks in Berlin last month to allow UNICEF a greater role in addressing problems faced by children affected by the war.
”You are not going to have peace unless you invest in children,” Bellamy said at the end of her brief visit to Sri Lanka last month. ”We don’t believe you can have peace unless you involve children in the process.”
She said the guerrillas admitted they had recruited underage combatants in the past and promised not to continue with the practice although there were fresh cases of forced child conscription in the island’s northeast.
Government officials said the issue of child soldiers which had attracted intense attention from international and local human rights groups was taken up during the two-day peace negotiations in Berlin last month.
Unicef’s initiative is separate from the peace talks and will focus on an ”action plan” to reintegrate demobilised child soldiers back in society and provide them with counselling and education, Unicef officials said.
The LTTE has returned 350 child soldiers to their parents since November 2001, but Unicef still has a list of 730 children who have reportedly been conscripted by the Tigers.
Scandinavians who are monitoring a truce in effect between the government and the LTTE since February 23 last year have reported more than 300 cases of child conscription by the LTTE in violation of the ceasefire. – Sapa-AFP