RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Top Official Questions NGO Commitment to CRC

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Nov 14 1999 (IPS) - Far from being committed to child-rights issues, some Sri Lankan non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were there only for the money to be made from foreign donors, a top official said Tuesday, without revealing any names.

“Some NGOs are like the Trojan horse — they come in, take a piece of the cake and go away,” Prof Harendra de Silva, chairman of the state-run National Child Protection Authority (NCPA), told reporters on Tuesday.

De Silva, known for his ~aversion to NGOs working to expose foreign paedophiles, said this was one area which drew a lot of funds from foreign donors and there were quite a few NGOs involved in this kind of work.

“Foreign donors gave a lot of money in the area of foreign paedophiles and NGOs enter this field purely for this purpose though the problem of local paedophiles is much, much greater and largely ignored,” he said.

“Most of the children abused by foreign paedophiles have already been abused by locals and tour guides but their problem is highlighted only when foreign paedophiles enter the picture,” he observed.

Sri Lanka is promoted, in some international tourism and gay magazines, as a haven for paedophiles. In recent times however the authorities have nabbed several of these child-sex offenders, posing as tourists, and either jailed or deported them.

De Silva and other government officials along with Yameen Mazumder, UNICEF’s deputy representative here, were present at a media briefing on the 10th anniversary of the UN Child Rights Convention (CRC), Nov. 20, which will be celebrated in Sri Lanka.

T. Dharmakulasingham, a spokesman for the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, in charge of the celebrations, announced that several events were planned for Nov. 21.

He said these include a peace procession by 2,000 children and the release of 2,000 balloons carrying a message of peace, aimed at raising public awareness on the rights of the child.

“The best thing we can do to for children is to work towards peace,” he said. A civil war raging in Sri Lanka for 16 years has orphaned tens of thousands of children, and turned many into child soldiers in the rebel Tamil Tiger army.

In May 1998, Olara Otunnu, a UN special representative, met top rebel officials and obtained assurances that children under 18 years would not be enlisted, but conscription was still a problem, according to a UNICEF official, in June this year.

The war itself seems unending: last week three or four strategic towns in the north were overrun by the rebels in one of the worst military setbacks for the government in 10 years.

A beleaguered government, facing fresh elections in December, has tightened emergency measures, including a clamp down on media reporting of the war.

As a result there are unconfirmed reports of at least 1,000 soldiers dying in the fighting, forcing President Chandrika Kumaratunga to issue a statement, Tuesday, clarifying that 101 soldiers were killed and another 743 wounded in action.

Thousands of people have been displaced in recent days in the northern Vanni region but both the government and UNICEF officials present at the briefing said they had no information about the plight of children caught in the fierce fighting.

De Silva, also a respected paediatrician and researcher on children’s issues, said it is “unfortunate” that Sri Lanka does not listen to its children, and recognise their rights.

“We do not recognise the rights of children and that is unfortunate,” he said. Sri Lanka ratified the CRC in 1990, and formulated a child charter, two years later.

A 1995 survey by De Silva in southern Sri Lanka of 1,200 children, revealed that 20 percent of the boys and 10 percent of the girls had been sexually abused by family, relatives or friends including father, older brother or an uncle.

“This is a serious issue but unfortunately child abuse does not get the attention of authorities like murder or terrorism,” he said.

De Silva said the National Child Protection Authority which he heads and was set up by Parliament earlier this year, has still not begun its work, because of procedural problems. It is now in the process of recruiting staff, he announced.

He said they intend to advise the government on policy

issues, one of which was the planned policy declaration on children, Nov. 20, which would be looking at making laws more effective and ensuring child abuse cases are dealt with fast.

“It is easy to have charters and laws but implementation has always been a problem. We must also see how and whether children actually benefit from these policy declarations and charters,” he added.

A survey conducted over a year by the Department of Census and Statistics, published this year, found close to a million children in Sri Lanka work for a living.