Stop using kids as soldiers; UNICEF to SL rebels

United Nations, Apr 28: The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has expressed concern over the possibility of a paramilitary group, which sides with the Sri Lankan government against separatist Tamil Tiger rebels, recruiting children as soldiers.

Though the so-called Karuna faction -- which split from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in 2004 and currently supporting government troops -- denies it is actively enlisting children as soldiers, UNICEF yesterday insisted there have been consistent reports that contradict the claim.

After returning from a mission last week to a conflict area where the Karuna group was supposed to provide UNICEF access to a camp, the UN agency's head of protection in Sri Lanka, Andrew Brooks, described the level of cooperation as "stalemated." "We seriously question whether the Karuna group is acting in good faith," he said in Colombo yesterday.

"Our supposed cooperation is obscured by the faction's apparent determination to delay, frustrate, and mislead the process to end the use of children as combatants in this country's conflict," he said, according to a transcript of Brooks' remarks made available at UN headquarters in New York.

Tamileela Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP) is the political arm of the Karuna group.

Last week's assessment was intended to be the first of a series of inspections to known locations of the Karuna faction and TMVP to verify that no children are being used as soldiers.

However, the leader of the UN team reported that he had been led to a hastily created mock site in a jungle area, and despite the Karuna group's repeated promises to fully cooperate, requests by the world body to inspect known locations were spurned.

After a UN fact-finding mission to Sri Lanka in November, the faction's leader, Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, known as "Colonel Karuna," reassured the United Nations that his group would cooperate in efforts to curtail child combatant recruitment.

Despite these assurances, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned in a report to the UN Security Council in January that "a particularly disconcerting development during the reporting period was the increase in abductions and recruitment of children in the east by the Karuna faction." The report also cited the Sri Lankan army's complicity in the group's efforts to enlist children.

"Unfortunately, despite exhaustive approaches to the Karuna group and TMVP officials since then, the few children they're released falls well short of the public commitments they've made," Brooks said.

"We continue to receive reports of children being recruited." According to UNICEF, at the end of last month, of the 285 children known to have been recruited as soldiers by the Karuna faction, there were 194 outstanding cases.

UNI