December target for demobilising Sudan child soldiers

April 24, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — The authorities in south Sudan said Monday they hoped all of the estimated 2,000 children still associated with armed forces in the region would be demobilised by the end of the year.

“We are determined to demobilise all child soldiers this year,” Benjamin Goro Gimba, the director of the southern Sudanese body in charge of disarming and reintegrating child soldiers, was quoted as saying in a UNICEF statement.

Gimba was speaking at a ceremony celebrating the demobilisation of a group of 250 children in the central Sudanese city of Malakal who belonged to a group that recently joined forces with the former southern rebel movement.

According to UNICEF, some 20,000 child soldiers or children working in non-combat positions mainly for the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) have been demobilised since 2001.

The batch of children being returned to civilian life on Monday was the largest since the signing in January 2005 of the peace deal that ended 21 years of bloody north-south civil war.

“It is time for these children to go home, go to school and enjoy the fruits of peace,” UNICEF’s Sudan representative Ted Chaiban was quoted as saying at the ceremony.

Since the end of the conflict, the SPLA has remained an entity but has formed joint units with the Sudanese government forces and sought to absorb smaller factions and splinter groups scattered over Sudan.

UNICEF appealed for 16.5 million dollars in donations to fund southern Sudan’s child soldier reintegration programme but said only 2.5 million had been pledged so far.

(ST/AFP)