Sri Lanka hopes cricket will heal child soldiers

Sri Lanka hopes cricket will heal child soldiers
Fri Mar 19, 2010 2:13pm GMT

COLOMBO, March 19 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka is hoping its love of cricket, the country's most popular game, will help rehabilitate children caught up in the island's bloody civil war with Tamil Tiger separatists.
Many Sri Lankan children have known little but war, which raged for 25 years before ending with a final push by government forces last May.
Sri Lankan authorities, backed by the International Cricket Council (ICC), the game's governing body, hope cricket will be able to help some of those children.
About 370 children are under government rehabilitation programmes to help them recover from the war. Some of them were trained by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to fight against the military, while others were used as child labourers.
An ICC-commissioned Cricket for Change group has begun week-long training for some of those children, hoping to help them heal, teach them values like teamwork and restore them to normal lives, officials said.
"I like this. Now we have the freedom and time to engage in sports and education," one 15-year-old, who identified himself as Dharmarathnam, told Reuters.
He said he had repaired diesel engines for the Tamil Tigers and had lived in their de facto capital, Kilinochchi.
Eighteen former combatants are among 24 children who have already graduated from the Cricket for Change programme after a week's training, officials said.
Standing in the international stadium in Colmbo where the Sri Lankan national team plays, Dharmarathnam and other children were dressed in white and blue outfits instead of the green-striped uniforms many of them had been forced to wear by the rebels.
"We are using the power of sport through this great partnership to reach out to vulnerable children and help them realise their full potential," said Philippe Duamelle, Sri Lanka's representative of the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF.