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| Monday, 19 April 2004 |
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by Nadira Gunatilleke The National Child Protection Authority (NCPA) calls for non-involvement of children in the conflict in the North East. Children and youth have faced the brunt of the trauma in this long-standing war. It is time that the public, irrespective of communal groups calls to an end these gross violations of human/child rights, an NCPA spokesman said. He said that the Convention on the Rights of the Children (CRC) and the ILO Convention 182 condemn the deploying of child soldiers. The CRC had mentioned the prevention of children from being conscripted in 1989. The exploitation of child labour is yet another form of abuse, and was very recently introduced as one of the worst forms of child labour under ILO Convention 182. Disallowing access to neutral information and dialogue with the outside world is itself a fundamental violation of the rights of the child (Article 17 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child-CRC). Conscription may cause children to commit suicide, an act of self-destruction that cannot be fully comprehended. Traditionally in Sri Lanka, rebel conscripts irrespective of age, wear cyanide capsules at all times, which they are trained to bite on during `suicide missions' or if they are captured. Hundreds of thousands of children are known to be used in warfare all over the world including Sri Lanka. According to the NCPA's Child Abuse Review 2001, when an adult persuades a child to commit suicide an act the child cannot comprehend for personal, social, economic or political reasons that the child cannot understand that persuasion constitutes a form of child abuse that may be called `suicide by proxy'. Conscripting children is abuse. When considering the different aspects of emotional abuse, a conscripted child will engage in violent, destructive and anti-social behaviour such as killing and destruction of property. Conscription terrorises a child with verbal assaults, bullying and blackmail and death threats all in the name of discipline. It isolates a child from the normal social experience and ignores his emotional and development needs by removing him from family life and schooling. It is important not to justify child recruitment and ensure that the blame lies squarely on the recruiters, while the atrocities caused by Government forces - whether it be in Sri Lanka, Palestine or Burma - should be addressed by the Governments themselves and if not by International War Tribunals. |
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