UN General Assembly
1997

also urge strict adherence to the Convention on the Rights of the Child by all actors in armed conflicts, and I stress the need for specific measures to demobilize and reintegrate child soldiers into society and the need for early action to conclude the drafting of the optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child in regard to the involvement of children in armed conflicts and the prohibition of recruitment of children under the age of 18. We reject the complacent assumption made by some that the involvement of children in armed conflict is inevitable and unavoidable. This is clearly not the case. Their participation is the result of heartless, deliberate and calculated decisions made by ruthless men, regardless of the loss of innocent lives, relentlessly pursuing their 10 megalomaniac ambitions. The leader of the LTTE, while sending to their deaths thousands of young children — the youngest of the young — brings up his own children in comfort and safety, far from the battlefields, far away from the country itself. This barbaric practice of conscripting or