Sri Lankan army warns children can be targets

The Sri Lankan government has defied growing condemnation and declared that it considered children and young people killed in an air strike to be combatants and legitimate targets. "If the children are terrorists, what can we do?" said a military spokesman, Brigadier Athula Jayawardana. The government claimed that children killed and injured in the bombing on Aug. 14 were child soldiers conscripted by the Tamil Tiger rebels. The United Nations children's organization, UNICEF, condemned the air strike as "shocking" in a statement issued in Geneva and New York. UNICEF's head, Ann Veneman, said: "These children are innocent victims of violence." The Tamil Tigers are known to use conscripted child soldiers. But UNICEF said its information indicated that those killed in the air strike were schoolchildren attending a first aid course. And there was international concern at the government's Aug. 16 statement that it was prepared to target and kill child soldiers. The full details of what happened in the air strike near Mullaitivu remain confused. The area where it took place is largely cut off from the rest of Sri Lanka by the fighting. But what is clear is that a large number of children and young people were hit. UNICEF staff who were allowed to reach the site saw more than 100 people between the ages of 16 and 18 being treated in hospital, many of them critical. It is also clear that there were deaths. Members of the European ceasefire monitoring mission were also allowed to visit the site, and they saw 19 bodies aged between 17 and 20, according to Thorfinnur Omarsson, the monitor's spokesman. "Even it is a 17-year-old child in terms of age, they are soldiers who are prepared to kill whoever comes in front of them," Keheliya Rambukwella, a Sri Lankan government defense spokesman, said.–Therefore the age or the gender is not what is important." The Tamil Tigers said that 61 schoolgirls were killed in the air strike, but no one has been able to confirm that figure. The Tigers initially claimed that the air strike had targeted an orphanage, but it has emerged that all the orphans had earlier been moved to another site.