Sudan child soldiers struggle to give up guns – UN

Feb 8, 2007 (UNITED NATIONS) — Former child soldiers in southern Sudan are failing to settle back into their communities and instead are picking up guns to fight again, a U.N. official said on Thursday.

Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka, the special envoy for children and armed conflict, visited Sudan late last month.

“We were seeing the phenomenon of children not being re-integrated fully into their communities and actually coming back to the armed forces — a remobilization,” she said.

UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, had helped demobilize several thousand child soldiers in southern Sudan since 2001.

She said the agency would conduct a study in the southern Sudanese capital Juba on child soldiers and the services needed in the region, devastated by decades of civil war, to help them reintegrate.

“We met a lot of young people, orphans and all, and many of them want to get back into the fighting,” Coomaraswamy told a news conference.

“They want to get back into the armed forces because they are used to carrying a gun, they have social status with a gun and they just can’t get back into their communities.”

A peace deal was signed in January 2005 to end two decades of civil war in the South but has yet to be fully implemented.

“Unless you build the community in Juba, unless you actually have education, sport, recreation for the community in Juba, these children are not going to go back,” Coomaraswamy said.

A report by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week said children were being recruited by militia groups and the southern Sudan defense forces. Moreover the brutal Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army has not yet released women and children it abducted in southern Sudan.

A report on Monday by British-based Save the Children accused Sudanese government forces of recruiting children as young as 8 in the South of the country, while over 8,000 children were still being used in rebel and militia groups across West Africa.

(Reuters)