UN Secretary General considers imposition of travel restrictions on LTTE

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's latest report on “Children and Armed Conflict,” says that Tamil Tigers had recruited more than 4700 children, some as young as 11 years, since 2001, an AFP news agency report filed from Colombo stated.

Sri Lanka Army Website in the recent past reported a chain of instances of LTTE child conscriptions including abduction of children from tsunami refugee camps and elsewhere, paying scant regard to the provisions of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that was signed between LTTE and the Government of Sri Lanka.

“The LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) has often carried out recruitment by force, abducting children while on their way to school or during religious activities, and beating families and teachers who resisted the seizure of children,” Mr. Annan has further stated.

He said he was recommending that the UN Security council take “targeted and concrete measures where insufficient or no progress has been made” by parties named in his report, including the Tigers.

“Such measures should include the imposition of travel restrictions on leaders and their exclusion from any governance structures and amnesty provisions, the imposition of arms embargoes, a ban on military assistance, and restriction on the flow of financial resources to the parties concerned.”

Annan's reports said that during 2004 alone, more than 1,000 cases of new recruitment and re-recruitment were reported to UNICEF, a high percentage of them girls.

Geoffrey Keele, spokesman for the UN children's fund (UNICEF), said they were still awaiting a response from the LTTE to their allegation that at least 40 child soldiers had been recruited since tsunamis killed nearly 31,000 people on December 26.

“We are still awaiting a response from the Tigers,” Keele said. “We don't know if the 23 children they freed last week are from the 40 recruited recently. The latest release was not done through UNICEF.”

International rights organizations have accused the Tigers of stepping up recruitment of child soldiers since entering into a truce with government forces in February 2002.