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UN Urges All Sierra Leone Parties to Keep Promises on Child Soldiers
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has called on all parties in Sierra Leone to keep their promises of not recruiting child soldiers, according to a UNICEF press release made available Thursday.
"We're very concerned right now about the threat to children," said Joanna Van Gerpen, head of UNICEF's office in Sierra Leone." The very high level of instability could lead us back into the vicious cycle where children are used as tools of war. This war is the business of adults--children shouldn't be forced to pay the price."
She said that the current crisis in the country could result in the renewed recruitment of child soldiers, a practice that most military leaders have repeatedly disavowed in the last two years.
UNICEF estimates that during Sierra Leone's nine-year civil war, some 5,000 children, mostly boys, were used as combatants. Thousands of other boys and girls were abducted and forced to become wood gatherers, cooks, sex slaves or porters for the military.
Sierra Leone was one of the first countries in the world to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Van Gerpen said that nearly 1,700 former child combatants had been "demobilized" since the signing of the Lome peace accords last July and the commencement of the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration program.
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