War hits Sri Lankan children

Sri Lankan children are suffering because of the civil war

The United Nations has said that children in Sri Lankan are worse off than before as new allegations are made that Tamil rebels are recruiting child fighters.

The United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said the situation for children had deteriorated - despite an initiative by the agency to protect them from the effects of the conflict.

War has an accumulative effect on children

Unicef's Collin Glennie

Olara Otunnu, a UN special representative on children and armed conflict, visited the island in March 1998 to examine the problems faced by children caught up in Sri Lanka's civil war.

"Generally there has been a deterioration of the situation of children since the Otunnu visit," Unicef's resident representative in Colombo, Colin Glennie, said.

"War has an accumulative effect on children so you can say that the general situation of children has deteriorated even after the Otunnu visit with the continuation of the conflict," he said.

Child soldiers

On Tuesday, a Tamil human rights group accused the Tamil Tigers of forcing ever larger numbers of children to become fighters.

The University Teachers for Human Rights said the Tigers started a massive child recruitment drive barely seven months after assuring the UN special envoy on children that they would not recruit anyone under the age of 17.

On Tuesday, a prominent Tamil human rights groups accused the Tamil Tigers of increasingly forcing children, some as young as 10, to become soldiers in order to build on their recent military successes.

The army is accused of carrying out extra-judicial killings

The University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR) - which reports say is made up of Tamil intellectuals - also criticised the army in its report.

It said the army had carried out extra-judicial killings and torture and failed to punish officers responsible for deliberate attacks against civilians.

But the BBC's correspondent in Colombo, Alastair Lawson, says the strongest criticism in the report was directed at the Tigers.

In one example, the UTHR report said nine out of 15 children who were recruited from a school in the rebel-held town of Mallavi had died.

In another instance, the Tigers were alleged to have burnt the uniforms of 20 schoolgirls who were recruited and forced to undergo military training.

Five girls who said they wanted to return home were "isolated, taken to a room, stripped, mercilessly assaulted and pushed onto the ground," the report said.

Reacting to the charges, the Tigers accused the group of being a front organisation for the Sri Lankan Government.