By IANS,
Kathmandu : Some of them took up arms when they were as young as 12. Some did it because their parents were dead and some to avenge a dead relative.
Now nearly three years after the end of a guerrilla war that killed over 13,000 and brought untold misery to a nation already racked by poverty, Nepal’s child soldiers, who fought the ‘People’s War’ as part of the Maoist People’s Liberation Army (PLA), finally have a future to look forward to.
Nepal’s new coalition government headed by Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal Thursday said it would start the process to discharge the child soldiers from Friday.
The Peace and Reconstruction ministry said 4,008 combatants, who were disqualified after a verification of the PLA conducted by the UN, would be set free from the cantonments where they have been living since the guerrilla army laid down arms in 2006.
Among these 4,008 are 2,973 child soldiers. It means they were recruited around or after 1996, when the armed uprising started, and they were under 18 then.
The rest are recruits taken in illegally after 2006, when the Maoists signed a peace pact and pledged not to expand their guerrilla army.
Dilli Bahadur Mahat, Nepal’s minister of state for peace and reconstruction, said a team comprising officials from his ministry as well as the UN Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), the UN agency that undertook the verification, would go to Nawalparasi district in western Nepal Friday for an on-the-spot assessment, starting the discharge process.
The exercise would be completed by Nov 2.
The freed child soldiers and others would be initially kept in a transit centre for maximum 45 days to facilitate their reintegration with their families as well as society.
After that, they would be provided training and other rehabilitation programmes.
The Unicef and other UN agencies have agreed to help in the rehabilitation.
Once the child soldiers are released, the government faces the weightier task of addressing the fate of the remaining 19,602 PLA combatants.
According to the peace pact, they were to have been merged with the army.
However, the merger has become contentious after Maoist chief Prachanda was recorded as saying that he had inflated the strength of the PLA to ensure greater numbers in the army. According to him, there are only 7,000-8,000 bona fide PLA fighters.