There is no doubt that children are great fighters. They are easy to indoctrinate and will follow blindly where their heroes lead. When children fight in a war, it is a sign of the complete breakdown of all things moral. Children in armed combat are clearly vulnerable to manipulation by adult soldiers and commanders. They often resort to joining the battle not because of a burning desire to serve the cause, but because they have few other options. Some weeks ago, Sri Lanka´s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar issued a severe rebuke to the Director of UNICEF in Sri Lanka. UNICEF, the only UN organisation dedicated exclusively to children, has a great track record, and a web page that says that "recruiting children into armed forces or sending them into combat situations of any kind should be considered a war crime by the proposed international criminal court".
What occasioned the dressing down from the foreign minister? After the recent battle of Kilinochchi, 26 fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) surrendered their arms. Many of them were under 15. Article 38 of the Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) states that children under 15 should not be used in war. (The international community is now, albeit somewhat late in the day, advocating an Optional Protocol to raise the legal age for war to 18.) In employing child soldiers, the LTTE had clearly violated children´s rights and the Sri Lankan government wanted this to be obvious to everyone. But UNICEF refused to issue an official statement condemning the LTTE´s actions.
UNICEF has many roles to play in Sri Lanka at the moment. One of the most important is ensuring that food, basic health care and essential supplies get to the about 300,000 children who live in LTTE-controlled areas like the Vanni jungles. UNICEF did not issue a condemnatory statement because it needs to maintain open lines of communication with the LTTE so that supplies for children, both soldiers and students, can get through.
Olara Otunnu, the United Nations Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict visited Colombo three months ago, and b199okered some commitments between the government and the LTTE. These concerned access to humanitarian supplies, return of displaced persons and the recruitment of child soldiers. The LTTE gave their commitment not to use children under 18 as soldiers, and not to recruit into their forces those who were under 17. They also agreed to a small but important caveat: as a way to identify any violation of the three commitments, a monitoring framework would be set up, to which the government also agreed. However, no one has yet put the crucial mechanism in place.