YANGON - Myanmar on Wednesday signed an agreement with the United Nations pledging to prevent the use of child soldiers and allow access to military units to check for underage recruits, the UN said Wednesday.
The action plan, inked by senior military officials and UN representatives in the capital Naypyidaw, is the result of years of negotiation with the government, the UN office in Yangon said in a statement.
“We will be able to work closely with the Ministry of Defence and visit various military units to identify under-age children if any, have them registered and released and provide assistance for their reintegration with their families,” said Ramesh Shrestha, the country representative for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
“The signing also means serious commitments from the government to ensure that there will be no more recruitment of under age children in the military,” he told AFP, adding that he expected an improvement in screening for recruitment.
There are believed to be thousands of under-18s in Myanmar’s state army and ethnic armed groups, although the exact figure is unknown.
“One of the problems is the lack of birth certificate among many young people,” said Shrestha. “Sometimes papers presented by the new recruits are not authentic.”
A recent report by the UN accused the military as well as six armed ethnic rebel groups of being “persistent perpetrators” of the recruitment and use of children, including the Kachin Independence Army in the far north of the country.
Save the Children country director Kelland Stevenson said that children were often tricked by recruiters.
“We know that children do not willingly join the military,” he said in a statement.
“They are often duped into migrating away from their homes with promises of good jobs and then recruited into the armed forces. These are usually some of the most vulnerable children who live in impoverished areas and need our protection.”
The agreement is part of efforts by Myanmar’s reformist government to shed its international pariah image following the end of decades of military rule last year.
In March the country signed a pact with the International Labour Organization to end forced labour by 2015. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode
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