What the child rights protocol means for us 

Child  recruitment continues despite promises to the UN

Disappointingly, in the case of voluntary recruitment, the minimum age has been raised to sixteen years, reportedly at the insistence of the United States and Britain, both of which allow volunteers to join their armed forces at seventeen and sixteen years. 

Both states have been severely castigated by reputed international and regional human rights watch bodies for what has been appropriately termed "their hypocritical stand on the issue of child soldiers." Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, members of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, have pointed out that drawing distinctions between "forced" and "voluntary" recruitment is not easy and that the United States and Britain have thereby weakened the effect of the treaty. 

What is of immediate interest to us is that clause of the Protocol, which prohibits insurgency and rebel groups from recruiting and deploying anyone under the age of eighteen "under any circumstances." 

And the part that the LTTE played in the process leading up to the coming into effect of the Protocol is of singular historical significance. When UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu asked for a public commitment from the LTTE leader in 1998 (after a meeting with Balasingham and Tamilselvam) to respect the principles and provisions of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, all that the LTTE leadership would agree to was a purely non committal and needless to say cosmetic readiness to have its cadres receive information and instructions on the provisions of the Convention. Subsequently, the LTTE specifically promised Otunnu that it would refrain from recruiting children below 17 years and from using children below 18 years in combat and also agreed to the monitoring of this commitment. 

Back at a headquarters briefing in New York shortly thereafter, when Otunnu was asked as to how precisely these commitments could be monitored, his answer was that the specific mechanisms remain to be decided.

"What is important (however) is that they have committed themselves to the principle of monitoring" he said.

As the years thereafter successively showed however, this commitment was spectacularly empty of substance. 

Velupillai Prabhakaran's baby brigades did not stop functioning purely because of promises made to international human rights monitors or even when the draft of the UN Protocol was approved in 2000 and international pressure intensified. 

The question as to whether the Protocol itself would have any more appreciable effect on it has to be left for the future. Meanwhile the sober detailing of exactly how child conscription continues to occur in the North of this country is for us to read in the recent bulletins of the UTHR, Jaffna. 

The Protocol meanwhile imposes a renewed obligation on states as well as armed groups to abide by humanitarian rules of conduct in relation to children. 

While conceding the difficulties of meeting urgent security threats in a climate where terror groups have no scruples about using children as soldiers or suicide bombers, the Sri Lankan government will accordingly be obliged to ensure the rights of children caught in the cross fire. 

The stark reality of Sri Lankan children trapped in a nightmare between terror groups and opposing forces, including the state, has been well documented in an Amnesty International (AI) publication titled "Children in South Asia – securing their rights". In one such typical story, an unaccompanied teenager then seeking asylum in the United Kingdom, told AI how members of the LTTE repeatedly tried to recruit him and his sister. 

They first came in 1993 when he was 14 years old and living with his family at a camp for internally displaced people at Urumpirai, Jaffna. The LTTE member who entered the family's hut was in civilian clothes but others waiting outside were in uniform and armed. When he and his sister refused, they allegedly said, "Think about it. If you don't join, we will come and take you." Later, after he and his family were further displaced to Chavakachcheri, the LTTE came again with the same request. 

His parents then sent him and his sister to Killinochchi to stay with relatives and then later to Colombo. When he and his uncle tried to cross into government held territory at Vavuniya round May, 1996, they were arrested by members of the Peoples' Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), then fighting along with the army. The juvenile who was by that time, 17 years old, was taken to a room and beaten with sticks and kicked with boots. His uncle was released with the message to come back and hand over Rs 10,000 for his release. After three days, the money was paid, and the boy released. Other instances of children as young as 12 recruited against their will by the LTTE and others as young as nine, carrying arms are also recorded. 

PLOTE and other Tamil armed groups fighting alongside the security forces have also been accused of recruiting children. Another account by an 11 year old Tamil boy, about a month after he was tortured at a small army camp near his home in Jaffna, reads thus;

" Two soldiers …..threw me in a tub which had no water in it. I got up and ran to my mother at the gate. I held my mother and asked her not to allow them to take me. They snatched me away again. I was put against the wall and one of the soldiers kicked me with his knee on the stomach. 

"I screamed. Then they took me behind their compound. There was a coconut tree. They tied my legs with rope and pulled me upside down. While hanging, I was beaten with netted (twisted) wire about six times. Then they let me down and tied my hands. I was beaten with sticks from the tulip tree" 

He had been beaten because the soldiers suspected that his family had provided food to members of the LTTE. When relating his experiences, he still had the marks of beatings on his buttocks. 

The soldiers eventually let him go, warning him not to tell anyone about his treatment. His mother did not dare to get medical care for his wounds. These and countless other stories of the horrors of children in armed conflict, define the national and international image of Sri Lanka. 

If, at any point in the future, the current climate of appeasement and ceasefire give way to grimmer realities, Sri Lankan policy makers should ready themselves to lobby the United Nations monitoring mechanisms and humanitarian agencies working on children in armed conflict, to use all the formidable power that they possess in implementing the Protocol. 

Particularly, as UN Expert of the Secretary General, Graca Machel's widely quoted 1996 report on the impact of armed conflict on children recommends, humanitarian agencies and organisations should seek signed agreements with non state entities, committing them to abide by humanitarian law. 

Machel who was appointed by the UN Secretary General as his expert to report back to the General Assembly, had some commonsensical but crucial points to make regarding the problematic issue of monitoring, pointing out that," Standards will only be effective however if and when they are widely known, understood and implemented by states and non-states." 

As the euphoria clears over the international consensus reached this week in Geneva on the Protocol, and negotiators get down to the sobertask of implementation and monitoring, what emerges out of the process may well be vital for the future of this country.