A UN envoy on Monday accused elements within Sri Lanka's security forces of helping to abduct children as soldiers for a group of renegade rebels who are fighting the Tamil Tigers.
Allan Rock, Special Adviser to the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict in Sri Lanka, said President Mahinda Rajapakse had vowed to immediately probe the allegations and punish those responsible. Rock said his mission had found credible evidence that troops were helping a group led by a former rebel commander called Karuna.
"One very disturbing element that confronted us ... has to do with the complicity and participation of some elements of the government's security forces in the forcible abductions by Karuna of children (in the east)," Rock told a news conference. "We encountered both direct and indirect evidence of this complicity and participation."
Sri Lanka's government is under mounting international pressure to halt fierce fighting with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that has killed around 3,000 civilians, troops and rebels so far this year amid the worst fighting since a now crumbled 2002 truce.
Rock said the Tigers were also recruiting children as fighters, failing to honour pledges. They had promised to release all under-age rebels by January 1. 2007. UNICEF lists 1,598 outstanding cases of under-age recruitment by the Tigers, 649 of which are still under the age of 18. The agency also lists 142 outstanding cases of under-age recruitment by the Karuna group.
Rock suspects the real number of under-age recruits is far higher. Earlier on Monday, thousands of protesters joined a march in Colombo to condemn the assassination of a prominent rebel-backed minority Tamil MP and demand the government and Tigers halt renewed violence. Shouting "Don't kill Tamils" and waving banners that read "Stop crimes against humanity" and "Shame", about 3,500 supporters of the non-partisan National Anti-War Front accompanied the coffin of Tamil MP Nadarajah Raviraj, who was killed on Friday.
He was the second high-profile member of the Tamil National Alliance, seen as the Tigers' political proxies in parliament, murdered since December. His colleagues blamed government forces or their supporters.
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