By Feizal Samath
KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Feb 13 2004 (IPS)

Three months ago, a group of young Tamil rebels walked reluctantly into a local children’s centre dressed in military T-shirts and displaying an air of militancy: shouting at staff, scowling, and being extremely boisterous.

Last month, they left the centre as playful, laughing youngsters.

”It’s going well,” says Penny Brune, head of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) office in this northern, rebel-held town. ”Initially there were some difficulties because this is the first transit centre here and quite different from those in African countries. But we are happy with the progress.”

The first batch of 49 children aged 15 to 17 years left the centre on Jan. 27. The sounds of the newest entrants laughing come across the small complex consisting of an office, classrooms, and housing quarters as journalists are ushered about the centre, set amid a cluster of trees with a small football field at the back.

The 10 children, nine of them girls, gather around a table as their teachers talk to visiting journalists. ”No pictures, and no interviews with the children, please,” says Brune. She agrees to a back-view picture of the kids as long as their faces are not shown.

UNICEF manages the centre with the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO), a relief group widely considered to be part of the rebel apparatus. Sri Lanka has seen two decades of warfare between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) insurgents, although a ceasefire is now in place.

The visit, lasting less than half an hour, is much too short to assess joint efforts by UNICEF and the rebels to reintegrate children working in the rebel organisation into the mainstream.

The centre opened in October 2003 amid adverse publicity as unnamed non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the state-owned Child Protection Authority voiced concern that money set aside to run the facility instead would be taken by the LTTE.

The LTTE denies accusations that it recruits children for military purposes, saying these children are volunteers handling non-combatant work. UNICEF officials and counselors say they do not ask the young inmates at the centre what they did in the LTTE.

”We don’t know. We don’t ask, anyway. If a child wants to talk about it to a social worker or if they need any kind of counseling, then they are free to talk about it,” says Brune, who has worked for more than three years in the war-ravaged Wanni district, since before the current ceasefire between government and rebel troops began in early 2002.

Even so, UNICEF has expressed concern about the Tigers’ continued recruitment of children. The agency, in a Jan. 22 statement, said it had received reports that 1,300-plus children had been recruited.

”The LTTE has accepted what’s in the report. We have spoken to them about it and they have said they would like to put more children in the transit centre,” says Brune. ”They accepted the report as it was. It was very factual.”

UNICEF estimated that 50,000 children in the war-affected regions of north-east Sri Lanka are out of school, around 140,000 have been displaced from their homes. Landmines killed 20 and maimed 17 children last year alone. Of the 400,000 internally displaced people in Sri Lanka, 34 percent or 136,000 are children, the agency said. Under a national action plan that addresses health, education and protection needs of children affected by war, Save the Children, an international NGO, is providing social work support and reporting on former child soldiers. The total cost of the action plan over a three-year period is 14.2 million dollars.

UNICEF, the U.N. Development Programme, and the International Labour Organisation are providing much of the funding for the plan, which also includes vocational training and small-loan programmes for new businesses.

Two more transit centres for former rebel children have been set up in Batticaloa and Trincomalee in the eastern region but will not open until the Kilinochchi centre reaches full capacity: 120 children.

UNICEF officials have been pleading for more children to be released. ”We continue to advocate for more to be released,” says Brune.

A TRO representative at the centre says the LTTE is pleased with the progress of this transit home and has agreed to release more children.

Most of the children from the first batch were reunited with their families while eight whose parents could not be found or who faced possible child abuse at home were placed in alternative child care facilities.

The centre embodies hopes that former soldiers will be able to regain their childhoods as this country inches toward peace. In places like this, devoid of a large military presence, the hopes seem attainable.

But in the nearby town of Jaffna, capital of the north and controlled by government troops, rows of barbed wire, dozens of bunkers, and a constant flow of armed soldiers give every indication of a town in conflict or preparing for one.

”Everywhere you see barbed wire. It gives an impression that this is an occupied place,” says the bishop of Jaffna, Thomas Saundranayagam.

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