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| Sunday, 6 March 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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LTTE and child soldiers The Hindu Editorial, March 5, 2005
In all the major military offensives by the LTTE against the Sri Lankan armed forces through the 1990s, children constituted a significant part of the group's strike force. Despite repeated censure by human rights organisations, the LTTE continues to conscript under-aged boys and girls into its fighting force. This is in indictable violation of agreements that the organisation signed with the United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC), Olara Otunnu, in 1998, and with the United Nations Children's Fund in 2003, that it would not recruit those below the age of 18. A report by Mr. Otunnu, presented by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to the Security Council where it was discussed recently, documents the fact that during 2004 alone the LTTE recruited or re-recruited 1,000 children. The report notes that girls accounted for a high percentage of these recruits. The organisation clearly has an insatiable appetite for children.
It is in this respect that the latest CAAC report is important. For the first time, it discusses the need for a mechanism that will monitor and report violations of children's rights, including the recruitment of children, and ensure compliance. The report, a comprehensive compilation of situations in which armed groups use and abuse children, notes that the existence of strong international norms has not halted atrocities against children. It urges the international community to "redirect its energies" to ensuring adherence to these norms. Sensibly leaving the primary responsibility for protecting children to national governments, the document recommends that where governments, weakened by years of conflict, are unable to do so, the U.N. Security Council, the General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, the Commission on Human Rights and regional organisations should supplement the efforts of national mechanisms. Noteworthy among the compliance enforcing measures it commends to the Security Council for adoption are the imposition of travel restrictions on leaders of the offending groups, their exclusion from any governance structures, and restrictions on the flow of financial resources. If the Security Council acts "expeditiously" on the report's recommendations as it has promised, the LTTE, which claims to be the sole representative of the Tamils of North-East Sri Lanka, will be hit hard. The LTTE evidently still believes it can fend off the international outrage over child soldiers by making vague and vacuous commitments. Nothing else explains its communication to Mr. Otunnu the day before the Security Council discussion on his report, expressing a "readiness to enter into a dialogue" on the issue. But the Special Representative, no longer as trusting of the organisation as he was six years ago, has asked the LTTE leadership "to embark immediately on tangible actions, leading to a time-bound action plan to end, once and for all, the practices of recruitment, abductions and use of children as soldiers." This is the most fitting response to a group that first denied ever recruiting children, then spread the fiction that boys and girls joined it voluntarily, later demobilised a few hundred child soldiers, only to re-recruit them. The LTTE must not be allowed any longer to get away with an abominable practice that the civilised world cannot tolerate. |
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Few forms of child abuse are more abhorrent than the practice of training
and sending children into armed combat. Yet the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam has got away with the forcible recruitment of child soldiers, some of
them as young as nine or ten years of age, and perhaps weighing only
slightly more than the weapons they are forced to carry. 
Thus far, the LTTE has acted with impunity in the knowledge that no one
can force it to stop recruiting children. 
