Rehabilitation for Sri Lankan Child Soldiers

In a joint statement between the United Nations and the Sri Lankan government, the government has said that it will rehabilitate child soldiers who were involved in the Sri Lankan civil war.

"(President (Mahinda) Rajapakse reiterated his firm policy of zero tolerance in relation to child recruitment. In cooperation with the UNICEF, child-friendly procedures have been established for release, surrender and rehabilitation of the child soldiers," the government said in a joint statement at the end of Ban Ki-moon's two-day visit to the island nation on Saturday.

"The objective of the rehabilitation process, presently underway, is to reintegrate former child soldiers into society as productive citizens," the statement said.

"The secretary-general (Ban Ki-moon) expressed satisfaction on the progress already made by the government in cooperation with the UNICEF," it added.

Foreign Policy has a short article outlining some of the myths regarding child soldiers. For instance:

"Our Current Approach to Ending Child Soldiering Is Working."

You wish. The international community primarily deals with child soldiers through deterrence (prosecuting the adult recruiters) and demobilization (taking away the children's guns and sending them home). Neither approach goes far enough.

In the first case, prosecutors hope to set an example for future would-be offenders. But most recruiters think they will not get caught. Others, knowing that only those who lose the fight get hauled before international courts, desperately employ child soldiers to avoid defeat. Still others assume they will be granted amnesty after a cease-fire. The Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda is a perfect example. Elusive warlord Joseph Kony has employed child soldiers since the 1990s without being captured, and Ugandan officials privately admit that they might need every carrot they can get (including amnesty) to negotiate a successful peace agreement.

Sending children home via disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs is another favorite method of post-conflict planners. These programs are meant to get children and adolescents out of armies and back where they belong -- in schools or in jobs. But here again, results are mixed. Many organizers make the mistake of excluding girls from their programs. They often fail to understand the local economy and therefore train children for the wrong professions. In Liberia, for example, too many ex-combatants were educated as carpenters and hairdressers. Nor do the programs target the roots of intergenerational violence that will long outlast the active fighting. DDR initiatives are often too short term to do much more than superficial training, as even officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development will admit.

The biggest challenge of all in ending child soldiering lies in the types of conflicts that employ the young. Children tend to be recruited in brutal, long-running civil wars, the kind that simmer for years or even decades. Unfortunately, these wars constitute the main form of armed conflict today. Until they stop, the recruitment of children never will.

The article is by Scott Gates and Simon Reich, co-editors of the forthcoming book Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States.

Ban Ki-Moon in Sri Lanka

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon toured the Sri Lankan war zone today.

In a Sri Lankan military helicopter, Ban flew over the ravaged northeastern coast where the final battles were fought. Buses were overturned, rooftops were blown off and bunkers were dug into the red earth. Debris was strewn across vast stretches of empty villages, which looked like a tornado had hit.

"As I was flying over the war zone, I thought the fighting must have been very severe and inhumane for the people trapped," Ban later said. "Quite a number of people lost their lives during the course of military fighting."

Afterward, Ban meet with Rajapaksa at his presidential home in the spiritual capital of Kandy. The hilly town is the site of a 1998 Tamil Tiger bombing at the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic. Thirty people were killed in the bombing at the historic temple, which is said to contain a tooth allegedly snatched from Buddha's funeral pyre.

Both sides in Sri Lanka's conflict have been accused of war crimes, especially during the past few months, when government troops cornered the Tamil Tigers on a narrow ribbon of land on the northeastern coast. Aid agencies say that the Tigers used terrified civilians, including children, as human shields, and that the government indiscriminately shelled hospitals and areas where civilians huddled in trenches. The government denies that claim.

"I'll convey the concerns and aspirations and expectations of the international community to Sri Lankan leadership," Ban said at the airport on his arrival. "Wherever there are serious violations of human rights as well as international humanitarian law, proper investigation should be instituted."

The UN Human Rights Council will be meeting in Geneva on Tuesday (Based on information from Amnesty International, I originally posted that they would be meeting on Monday). Amnesty International has recommendations for dealing with the humanitarian crisis and for investigating and monitoring human rights abuses.

The Human Rights Council should note that the human rights issues in Sri Lanka go beyond the current humanitarian crisis. They stem from a breakdown in the rule of law and a pervasive climate of impunity which has seen human rights violations by the security forces go unpunished for decades. I should also mention that the Tamil Tigers have over the years been responsible for gross human rights abuses, including deliberate and indiscriminate killings of civilians, torture of prisoners, and the forced recruitment and use of child soldiers.