RP urges removal from UN child soldiers list

MANILA – The Philippines has urged its removal from the UN’s list of countries with child soldiers, stressing that it condemns the practice by various rebel groups, the foreign department said Wednesday.

Hilario Davide, Manila’s envoy to the UN, made the call during a meeting of the UN Security Council Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict in New York on May 8, it said.

Davide said the Philippines has put in place a “legal firewall for the protection of children” and advised the UN to focus on countries “facing worse circumstances” involving child soldiers.

“The Philippines condemns non-state actors in the country who recruit, abduct, and use children, yet deny their illegal and unjustifiable deeds,” Davide said.

The Philippines was listed in 2005 through a Security Council resolution over reports that the communist New People’s Army (NPA), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Abu Sayyaf used children as combatants.

The communist rebels admitted using children in non-combat duties, although there have been cases of NPA child soldiers arrested by military intelligence. Children are also often seen in MILF training camps in the southern island of Mindanao.

Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN’s special representative for children in conflict, said the Philippines’ listing was not meant to embarrass the country, but to acknowledge that the problem exists.

Coomaraswamy cited a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study saying that the MILF adopts orphans to train as fighters, while the NPA is known to employ children as porters, cooks and couriers.

The 12,000-strong MILF has been waging a rebellion since 1978 for an independent Islamic state in Mindanao. Talks with the group were suspended last year. The NPA meanwhile has been waging a low-intensity Maoist insurgency since 1969. –Agence France-Presse, from ABS-CBS News Online