BATTICALOA, 9 May 2008 (IRIN) - The Karuna faction, the Tamil Tiger breakaway group, which has been transforming itself from an armed military group into a political party, released 39 underage recruits in April 2008.

The group, officially known as the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pullikal (TMVP), released 28 children on 24 April after 11 were let go on 11 April.

The TMVP was formed by the former eastern military commander of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Vinayagamurthi Muralitharan, alias Karuna, after he broke away from the Tigers in April 2004. It now controls all nine local governing divisions in its native Batticaloa District in eastern Sri Lanka following a clean sweep in elections on 10 March, and is contesting the Eastern Provincial Council election on 10 May as a coalition partner of the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance.

The TMVP is now led by Karuna's chief lieutenant Sivasuntharai Chandrakanthan, alias Pillayan, the party's candidate for the chief minister of the province, who has taken pains to rehabilitate the party's image.

In addition to the release of children into a government-led rehabilitation programme supported by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), it has restricted its armed members to camps in the interior forests in the eastern province or inside its compounds in more populated areas and they no longer travel in public carrying arms.

The TMVP told IRIN it had voluntarily decided to release the children, who it said had sought protection. "We never gave these children armed training; they came to us for protection," TMVP spokesperson Azad Moulana told IRIN. "There were 48 children under the age of 16 with us and we have released 39 so far. We will release the rest before the [10 May] election," he said.

However, according to a UNICEF database, 76 recruits younger than 18 are still with the TMVP, down from 131 at end-March.

UNICEF has intensified its monitoring mechanism recently, according to the agency's officials in Colombo. UNICEF officials personally visited and interviewed families of child recruits remaining with the TMVP to verify each case.

"We absolutely verified every single case in the books by visiting the families," Gordon Weiss, UNICEF chief of communications in Sri Lanka, said.

"A year back there was a lot of fighting [in the east] and families reported their children being forcibly recruited," Weiss said. "Now there is no fighting and our hope is that there is a genuine change in policy by the TMVP on child recruitment."

Chandrakanthan had told campaign meetings that the party would not engage in underage recruitment.

The Sri Lankan government welcomed the releases, the largest by the group, as a clear sign of the return of the rule of law to the east. "The government views the release of these children as further signs of the strengthening of democracy and return to conditions of normality in areas of the Eastern Province," the Ministry of Human Rights and Disaster Management stated.

"The government, as part of its zero-tolerance policy on the recruitment of children for use in armed conflict, has taken steps to secure the release and initiate programmes of rehabilitation for children caught up in armed conflict."

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