Development: British drive to stop children joining armies

REDUCING THE number of child soldiers will be among the main aims of a British initiative to reform Third World security services.

The drive to cut the number of child troops - estimated at up to 200,000 worldwide - was unveiled by the Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, in a speech to the Institute for Defence Studies, in London yesterday. She was giving details of how a proportion of Britain's pounds 2.4bn- a-year international aid budget will be used for the first time to back military reform in the developing world.

"It is terrible that children - some of them as young as nine or ten years old - are forcibly recruited into the military and made to kill and commit atrocities," Ms Short said. She added that in collaboration with the United Nations, Britain had committed itself to trying to reduce the number of children involved in armed conflicts over the next three years.

There was sound logic behind channelling aid-budget funding into reforming security services, including the military, paramilitary and intelligence services. One of the principal obstacles to poverty reduction, Ms Short said, was the existence of "bloated, secretive, repressive, undemocratic and poorly structured security sectors in many developing countries".

She added that the "objective is to help to promote stability and peace through making the security sector more transparent, accountable and subject to proper civilian control".

There was no question of development resources being used to strengthen military forces' aggressive capability, or of being linked to arms sales.