Child soldiers too scared to go home - relief agencies

Child soldiers, uprooted from their families and plunged into Liberia's civil war, are lingering in temporary camps because they are too scared to return home and insufficient facilities have been created to cater for them, child protection agencies and a government commission said. After turning over their weapons, the young ex-combatants are entitled to a three-month stay in care centres, which offer medical aid, counselling, reading lessons and help tracing families. But the stop-gap is turning more permanent for many. "Children spend more than the maximum period of 12 weeks in the interim care centres which should not be the case", said Allen Lincoln, the head of Roman Catholic child protection agency, Don Bosco. "We are worried about reintegration and rehabilitation." Allen said former child soldiers were concerned about their personal safety if they went home and even if they did return, the lack of schools or other community structures meant readjusting would be difficult. "There are no actual facilities in those communities to receive them. Children expressed fear of their security in counties where they come from. Those counties are either occupied by ex-fighters of their rival warring groups or inaccessible because there is no deployment of UN peacekeepers", Lincoln said. Save The Children painted a similar picture, saying former child soldiers could not necessarily rely on their own families for support when they left the interim care centres (ICCs). "Most children associated with fighting forces in ICCs fear getting back to their communities because of retaliation, stigmatisation and rejection by their families", said Christine McComnick, a disarmament advisor with the charity. According to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), former child soldiers account for about six percent or 2,770 of the 42,755 combatants who have given up weapons since the launch of the disarmament program last December. Boys make up the vast majority - 2,231 versus 539 girls. The Liberian government's Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission said it was aware of children exceeding the envisaged three-month stay in interim care centres and was trying to tackle the problem. "We have been holding a series of meetings with UNICEF and other child protection agencies on this matter," commission spokesman Molley Passaway told IRIN. "We are working out a means of renovating schools in the rural parts of Liberia where children would enroll after leaving those interim care centres. In the meantime they are being taught basic literacy in the centres," he said. An added complication for those trying to rehabilitate child soldiers, are those children who were sucked into Liberia's war from neighbouring countries such as Sierra Leone. Save The Children's McComnick said arrangements were being put in place for the International Committee of the Red Cross to carry out cross-border family tracing and reunification for those children. The head of UNMIL's disarmament and reintegration programme, Clive Jachnik, confirmed there were a small number of foreign child soldiers being demobilised. "We have come across them. I do not have the statistics to know exactly how many of the children associated with fighting forces are foreign nationals, but they are not very many. Just a few dozen", Jachnik said, adding that the governments of both Liberia and third-party countries would decide the fate of those foreign children.