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(COLOMBO) Despite repeated assurances made to representatives of the UN, Amnesty International and the Scandinavian peace monitors in Sri Lanka, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) continue to recruit child soldiers.
"There was an explosion of complaints again in January and lots in February," according to Hagrup Haukland, chief of staff and deputy head of the peace-monitoring mission. He says cases are reported from all six of the monitors' offices in the country's North and East. "Child recruitment is still on. They have not stopped it."
However, at the fifth session of peace talks held in Berlin in February, the Tamil Tigers claimed to have stopped child recruitment, saying they were committed to a joint program with UNICEF for the return of child soldiers to their families.
This is the first time human rights and the demobilization of child soldiers have figured in peace talks between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE. The peace process was launched after a Norwegian-brokered truce was declared last year. The Tigers have been fighting for a separate state of `Tamil Eelam' in the North and East of Sri Lanka for 19 years. An entire generation of children there has grown up in an environment of war.
Referring to a list of 350 names of children submitted by the peace monitors,...