KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, 4 October 2003 — The first transit center to return Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers’ “Baby Brigade” to civilian life opened yesterday, but doubts remained over whether the rebels are sincere about giving up their child soldiers. The 49 children the Tigers released to the newly built cement block dormitories in the rebel-held north will give up training for war to return to their homes, part of a peace process to end two decades of civil war.

“I was badly beaten by the military and joined the movement so they would educate me,” said one 16-year-old boy hiding his eyes under the brim of his baseball cap. The Tigers tightly controlled reporters’ access to the children — who under UNICEF’s rules cannot be identified by name — and the boy’s comments echoed the rebels’ position that child soldiers were not forcibly recruited, but joined the movement because of military persecution or poverty.

The mustard colored dormitories on the edge of war-scarred Kilinochchi town are part of a $14 million Action Plan drawn up by the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to help 50,000 war-affected children in the north and east.

The center, opened by the UN Children’s Fund and the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, is the first formalized effort to return home children who joined the LTTE or were forcibly recruited during the war that killed 64,000 people.

“These children released have now taken the first step out of a military environment toward a normal life,” said UNICEF country representative Ted Chaiban. Similar halfway houses are being built in Batticaloa and Trincomalee on the east coast. Each center will be able to house 150 children at a time, with a maximum stay of three months.

But the opening comes amid criticism the Tamil Tigers — notorious for using children as young as 10 in their fight for a separate state — have not eased up on recruiting child soldiers since signing a cease-fire 19 months ago.

“There are worries they have been recruiting child soldiers just to release them, that they are putting on a face with this,” said one official close to the peace process in Colombo. Children are thought to comprise more than 20 percent of the rebels’ fighting force, but figures on recruitment — which UNICEF says is continuing despite the ceasefire — vary widely.

“UNICEF is still receiving cases of child recruitment in all districts of the northeast and it has to be understood that, if the reintegration of child soldiers is to be successful, the new recruitment of children has to stop,” said Chaiban.

Sinhala nationalists and some of the media in Colombo have been sharply critical of UNICEF for dealing with the TRO, a rehabilitation body controlled by the Tigers. But it is the first time such a large number of child soldiers have been publicly released by the Tigers, who only admitted last year they had used children.

The issue of child soldiers is considered a litmus test of the sincerity of the rebels, whose leader Velupillai Prabhakaran dropped out of school at 16 to spearhead the fight for a separate Tamil state. Several other top-ranking cadres joined as children, including Soosai, the head of the Tigers’ navy wing, who joined the movement when he was 13.

Tiger leaders, government representatives and UN diplomats ceremonially lit a traditional coconut oil lamp to mark the opening of a transit home for child soldiers, but the children themselves were shielded from the international media. UNICEF did not allow journalists to interview the 27 girls and 22 boys who became the first batch of children demobilized by the Tigers under the project funded by the UN agency.

“Our main concern is the children and we want to do everything possible to protect their identity and make it easier for them to go back to their homes,” Chaiban told reporters. The children will sleep in bunk beds in the converted building before they are deemed ready to return to their families.