Children

On July 6 at 8 and 11 PM ET on CNN, the US Fund for UNICEF will air, “The Survival Project: One Child at a Time”. UNICEF is encouraging supporters to not only to watch the broadcast, but to host a viewing party to discuss these important issues of child survival. UNICEF has developed a viewing party guide to help you to easily host a party. The first 100 parties registered will receive a packet of materials including UNICEF signs and buttons. Register your party today!

The broadcast will be hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Chief Medical Correspondent for CNN, who will highlighting progress and challenges in child survival. In the broadcast CNN will explore why 26,000 children die every day from preventable causes, and what UNICEF doing to save young lives. The show will look at four areas where UNICEF works on-the-ground to save children’s lives:

• Child protection in Iraq
• Water and sanitation in Laos
• HIV/AIDS in Peru
• Child survival interventions in Ethiopia

Countries which are involved in conflict and strife are seeing an increasing use of violence against children, including kidnapping, torture and even murder. UNICEF issued a statement on the continued abduction, torture and rape of children around the world, saying;

“It is everyone’s duty to ensure children are safe from harm, and governments have a responsibility to enact and enforce measures that provide a protective environment for all children”.

Countries for which UNICEF has reported similar ochering incident in a number of countries including Central African Republic (CAR), Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Iraq and Haiti.

In CAR armed gangs have profited from the conflict ridden countries vitality and instability, focusing on rural communities for which their terrorizing often includes kidnapping children and holding them for ransom. Earlier this month both CAR and Chad had agreed to the Release of Child Soldiers , however a number of armed groups continue to increase their ranks of child soldiers.

The DRC has seen thousands of children forcibly recruited by armed militant groups to be used as child soldiers, porters and sex slaves. UNICEF has estimated that some 30,000 child soldiers are in place in the DRC, many are girls and the situation has been noticeably on the increase as seen in my post, Child Soldiers in the Congo are Increasing

In Iraq the number of reports of children recruited and used by militias and insurgent groups are increasing, as is the abduction of girls who “are increasingly subject to murder, kidnapping and rape, or are being abducted and trafficked within or outside Iraq for sexual exploitation”.

UNICEF has paid particular attention to the Impoverished of Haiti, where kidnappings have become all too common. Since the beginning of 2008 alone more than 50 children have been abducted, more than half of which where girls. Earlier this month on June 4th UNICEF made a nation wide call to halt the kidnappings of Haitian children, the call came after a recent incident where a 16-year-old hostage was murdered and other hostages, including infants, where lynched and rape. The call from UNICEF was joined by Haitians demonstrating against the kidnappings in the streets of Port-au-Prince. UNICEF estimates that some 2,000 children are trafficked each year to the Dominican Republic, and another 1,000 are working as spies, messengers or soldiers for armed gangs in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

According to the Child Soldiers Global Report 2008 issued by the Secretary General of the United Nations, the number of armed groups and government forces using child soldiers increased from 40 in 2006 to 57 in 2007. The issues, such as poverty, disease and economic destabilization that face children in conflict countries are only compounded by the increasing violence against children. As the use of rape as a weapon of war, conscription of child soldiers, and other violence, including gender based violence, that directly targets children, not only exacerbates the conflict itself, but impedes the post conflict recovery for not only the children, but their entire community and the country on the whole. Therefore it is essential that individual states and the international community on the whole end the long running impunity of these violent crimes, and take greater steps to see that children are no longer used as the weapons and pawns of war.

In recent months I have brought you a number of posts regarding gender-based violence, including the use of rape as a weapon on war. While the subjects of of gender-based violence and rape warfare are nothing new, their voice has continually been silenced by impunity and rarely a massive topic of world leaders. However this month the UN has taken measure to target the use of rape as war crime.

Earlier this month, Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro called for international action to bring gender-based violence to an end. Migro stressed that the end to gender-based violence will allow women who have been impeded women, the opportunity aid in the peace building process, stating that women are a, ‘a powerful weapon in the fight for peace, development and human rights’ (UN).

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on led the debate on war crimes against women and girls, including the atrocities of rape and mutilation, which have become all too common strategic tools of combat. The discussions led the United Nations Security Council to pass the U.S.-sponsored resolution on June 19th, declaring that rapes can constitute war crimes. A similar effort to pass a resolution last was blocked by China, Russia and South Africa, all of which argued that sexual violence did not warrant the attention of international peacekeepers.

The countries at particular focus with the renewed vigor of the international community are countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan, where rebels continue to strategically use rape as a weapon of war.The resolution comes at a critical time when the use of rape as a weapon of war rages on in Sudan, and continued reports from UN peacekeepers in Darfur have warned that systematic rapes of women and children continue to plague the region. Thousands of women and girls have been raped, and aid groups are state that the practice continually being used as a strategic form of ethnic cleansing (CNN).

Ines Alberdi, executive director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) writes in a letter to The New York Times;

A resolution is set to address this challenge. Often called “a war within the war,” sexual violence occurs in private spaces rarely patrolled by police or peacekeepers, often at times when security actors are scarce.

The letter was in response to the June 15th article, “The Weapon of Rape,” by Nicholas D. Kristof, where he stated;

World leaders fight terrorism all the time, with summit meetings and sound bites and security initiatives. But they have studiously ignored one of the most common and brutal varieties of terrorism in the world today.

It appears that world leaders have finally begun to hear the silenced cries of women and girls across the globe, across the centuries, who have been the countless victims of the use of rape as a weapon of war. While all the steps taken this week are a great step in the right direction, the long running impunity of rape as a weapon of war leaves many skeptical about the reality of the resolutions effect.

More news on the recent international effort to end gender-based violence:

Rice leads UN debate on war crimes against women

Ban leads call for greater efforts to end ‘silent war’ of sexual violence in conflict

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has launched the second part of its multi-phase campaign to detect and treat widespread malnutrition in Togolese children. The agency is now targeting dozens of more isolated villages in the Savanes and Kara regions in the north of the West African country and the Maritime region in the far south after earlier reaching bigger population centers, according to a statement released by UNICEF June 15. (UN News Service)

Students and teachers clashed with police in Chile on June 18 to protest an education bill they say doesn’t go far enough to bring equal access to schooling for the poor even with a government flush with copper dollars. About a thousand students marched shoulder to shoulder in the nation’s capital, confronting police with tear gas and water canon in the upscale Providencia neighborhood. In Valparaiso, the port town where the national Congress is debating the controversial legislation, 10,000 teachers marched in peaceful demonstrations. (Reuters)

Chinese police have detained a retired teacher on subversion charges after she decried the state of many schools buildings that toppled during last month’s devastating earthquake, the Information Center for Human Rights said on June 18. The Hong Kong-based human rights group said police in southwest China’s Sichuan province detained Zeng Hongling for “inciting subversion” after she wrote essays arguing that corruption made a mockery of school building standards. The more than 70,000 people killed in the May 12 quake included thousands of children crushed in schools, which often collapsed even as nearby buildings stayed upright. (Reuters)

A Dutch court began hearings June 18 about whether survivors of a 1995 massacre of Muslims in Bosnia, Europe’s worst mass killing since World War II, can sue the UN for failing to prevent the slaughter. Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Muslims in one week in July 1995, overrunning the Srebrenica enclave declared a UN safe zone. Dutch peacekeepers overwhelmed by the Serbs’ superior force watched helplessly as the male victims were led away from their custody for execution. The Mothers of Srebrenica, survivors of the men and boys killed in 1995, are among those seeking compensation from the UN and the Dutch state in the civil lawsuit. (AP/MSNBC)

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it is scaling up its emergency operation in Iraq to address the basic needs of more than 360,000 vulnerable children inside the strife-torn nation. After five years of conflict, more than 800,000 Iraqi children are unable to go to school and only 40 per cent can access safe water, according to the agency. Through its Immediate Action for Vulnerable Children and Family - or IMPACT program - UNICEF is aiming to assist over 360,000 children this year and ensure they have access to health care and are protected against malnutrition. (UN News Service)

The work of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is no longer going to be only about delivering food, the former “food aid agency” announced in its new strategy for the next three years (2008-2011); it would now bill itself as a “food assistance agency”. Oxfam’s Mousseau cautioned that while his agency “welcomed” the new range of objectives and activities, “We think this new plan should not necessarily translate into more activities for WFP but rather better quality and effectiveness of WFP’s work. (IRIN)

In Eastern Burma the atrocities against ethnic minorities has continued, according to a recent report by the Free Burma Rangers. The government has continued it’s campaign against civilians as attacks on Karen villages have caused more than 1,000 civilians to flee their homes.

In a report, “Crimes Against Humanity In Eastern Myanmar.”, issued by Amnesty International, increasing cases of crimes against humanity are gravely documented. According to the report, more than 140,000 were victimized at the hand of the Burmese government. Assaults and abuses against the countries minority population include rape, murder and forced labor.

Please also see various reports issued by Human Rights Watch on Burma here. For further information see my previous posts The Increase of Child Soldiers in Myanmar and The Children of Burma/Myanmar

Waging Peace, a British NGO, issued a report stating that between 7,000 and 10,000 Darfurian children abducted from refugee camps in Chad are serving as child soldiers. Please also see my other posts on Child Soldiers. The report comes right after the earlier report this month on the Release of Child Soldiers in Chad.  Please  also see my other posts such as, Despite Increased Aid Efforts We Are Still Failing the Children of Darfur

In other news on the situation Darfur international negotiators have called the prospects for new peace negotiations about Darfur “dim.” In an effort to revive the peace process, the UN and AU are working to appoint a joint mediator, which would replace the current negotiators. All of this comes right as the Sudanese government stated its readiness for a ceasefire and peace negotiations, so long as JEM is banned from participating. The JEM and SLM movements currently reject the idea of peace talks, while the SLM-Unity movement stated its intention to launch attacks on Khartoum. Additionally the civil war between the Northern and Southern regions of Sudan was nearly reignited due to a boundary dispute in the Abyei region. The dispute has left many of the residents of Abyei displaced and the town nearly destroyed.

It is painfully clear that the situations in both Sudan and Chad will not come to a clear peaceful resolution soon, and that the children will continue to be swept up in the ciaos until  a true peace can be found and stability finds its way to the region.

Is this the end for the cluster bomb? For many the idea of placing a ban on a military weapon which is said to inflict a 98% civilian casualty rate is seen by many a no brainier. However when states unite on the issue feet seem to drag. It took weeks before the latest ban on the weapon, many of which have lain scattered across countries for decades, could finally reach an agreement. Last month in Dublin, on May 28th, representatives of 111 countries agreed to ban the use of cluster bombs. The use of cluster bombs have been highly criticized by human rights groups for maiming civilians, many of which are children, who pick up unexploded bombs scattered over a large area. The agreement was reached after U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown personally intervened, however the primary manufactures and users of this cluster bombs, including; the U.S., Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan did, were are parties to the treaty (The Washington Post).

In wake of the treaty many landmine survivors have welcomed the ban on cluster bombs, including Uganda.

“As people who have been on the forefront of this campaign, we see the approval of the treaty as a major breakthrough and we pray that countries stick to the treaty,” Margaret Arach, the chairperson of the Uganda Landmine Survivors Association, told IRIN on 3 June.

In Laos the cost to is all to clear when you look in the faces of children like 9 year old Joi was badly injured and who’s brother was killed three years ago when they detonated a cluster bomb when they went into the nearby forest to dig for fishing worms

“It still hurts, but mostly I’m still scared … scared to go into the forest, scared to play there. I’m scared of the bomblets” (IRIN).

From 1966 to 1975 the US forces targeted 15 of 17 Laos provinces in an aerial campagin to stem the tide of North Vietnamese troops, who were infiltrating South Vietnam through the country, according to the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) for the UXO/Mine Action Sector in Lao PDR. Based on records released by the US Air Force in 1999, an estimated 277 million bomblets were dropped on Laos over that time.

Right at the discussions for the treaty began landmines claim new victims in Casamanc, who is fighting for independence from Senegal, as one fatality and 20 injuries ensued as a bus drove over a landmine 70km north of the Casamance capital Ziguinchor on the 1st of May. Youssouf Coly, resident of a nearby village, agreed. ‘’I am convinced it is the rebels who have laid this mine and they are targeting the army,” he said (IRIN). The incident was the second in a week, along with other incidents of violence in violation of the December 2004 peace accord.

So will this treaty have the effect needed to see a true end to the cluster bomb? The sad reality is no, for even if all countries end their use of the weapon the harsh reality is still strewn across the ground. While demining efforts are in place in many countries, the cost of such is extensive on an economic, training and human toll. Thus leaving a mine free world as a distant dream.

Other Recent News on Cluster Bombs:
IRAQ: UN agencies call for international help to clear mines BAGHDAD, 6 April 2008 (IRIN) - Marking the third annual International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action on 4 April, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called for a global effort to help Iraq in its mine clearance operations.

PAKISTAN: Landmines ruin lives, leave hundreds dead - PESHAWAR, 4 April 2008 (IRIN) - Palvasha Ahmed and her two younger sisters know all too well the risks posed by landmines. “Our cousin, Maryum Ahmed, 19, was injured by a landmine nearly a year ago in her village in South Waziristan. She lost her right foot and now goes around on a crutch. No one will marry her,” the 17-year old said in Peshawar, the provincial capital of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1899)

Millions of children are forced to grow-up in a conflict ridden nations, children from Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Lebanon, Occupied Palestinian Territory/Israel, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda, to Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Colombia, all faces the daily challenges, violence and destruction of war. The UN estimates that more than 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts; another 6 million permanently disabled; and over 250,000 children are used as child soldiers.

One can only hope that the children of war who survive its tragedies, those who witness it’s horrors will in truth be stronger adults. However the sad reality is that many children of war, do not survive, as war puts children at an increased risk for disease, hunger, and displacement. In addition many more do not grow in positive strength from the trials and tribulations of a childhood of war, as war makes them more prone to acts of violence.

For more information on children in conflict, please see the UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for the office of Children in Armed Conflict. Please also see my other posts on Children and War.

One doesn’t have to think long and hard to realize that children who are born into conflict ridden countries are at a disadvantage to those children born into peaceful nations, however the disparity between the two when it comes to education may very well surprise you. Some 500 times more funding goes into the education of children who are born in countries seen as stable and prosperous than that of their counterparts born into a conflict-affected country, according to Save the Children.

For example: The United States spends more than $9,000 per child on primary education annually. In Luxembourg, some $12,000 is spent on each child for primary education a year. These two wealthy and stable nations tower in comparison to conflict countries such as Eritrea or Burundi, who spend less than $24 a year on an individual child’s education.

There are some 37 million children out of school in conflict affected countries, these children are not just denied their individual rights to education, but also denied a chance at a more prosperous future. Children who are denied an education are not given the opportunity to escape the cycle of poverty for not only themselves, but also their families and their communities. Additionally countries in which children are denied access to education have increased difficulty braking the chains of violence and conflict.

Wealthy and stable countries, donor countries, have a crucial role to play to help children in conflict-affected nations gain access to an education. It is for this reason that Save the Children released a new report, “Last in Line, Last in School 2008″,which shows how “donors are failing to protect children in conflict-affected fragile states”. The report focuses on the fact that wealthy nations are literally causing a deterioration to the lives of children as they fail to support education in conflict countries.

So how much is really needed of wealthy nations? Is it too much? No, in reality the report boils it down to some $45 per child, as Save the Children estimates that $5.2 billion should support children living in conflict-affected fragile states, out of some $9 billion in basic education worldwide.

The denial of education is the denial of a future of peace and prosperity!

In my post on August 1, 2007, UN Peacekeepers and the Abuse of Children, I reported on the failings of UN peacekeepers in the wake of recently emerging and wide spread abused in Liberia. However as I reported then then these abuses where not new in the world of the blue helmets, and nor are they isolated. In 2006 the Security Council states that Problem of sexual abuse by peacekeepers now openly recognized, Broad strategy in place to address it, stating that;

“We dishonour these brave men and women when we fail to prevent or punish those from within their ranks who victimize the very people peacekeepers are meant to protect and serve.”

The issues has once again re-emerged in the press and as before one of the issues has been the delay in both reporting and action taken to both prevent and prosecute perpetrators. However in the re-emerging reports of abuse it is not just peacekeepers who have been thrust into the spotlight as abusers, but civilian aid staff. As this past week abuses by UN peacekeepers and aid workers have been brought to light after a report, No One to Turn To: The under-reporting of child sexual exploitation and abuse by aid workers and peacekeepers, by Save the Children UK.

The report was composed of research done over the past year in Haiti, Southern Sudan and Ivory Coast, where the group conducted 38 focus groups with 250 children and 90 adults. Following the focus groups in-depth interviews and other research where conducted to compile the findings which included: children trading sex for food, forced sex, verbal sexual abuse, child prostitution, child pornography, sexual slavery, sexual assault and child trafficking. The age of the victims identified in the report where as young as six years old, however the majority of victims ranged in age between 14 and 15.

The report has made national and international headlines, as the news has left many dismayed and confused by the actions of those sent to protect those most vulnerable by the tragedies of armed conflict. In the recent spotlight individual stories of peacekeepers turned predictors have emerged, such as, Didier Bourguet, a U.N. official from France, who was found to have thousands of photos of him having sex with hundreds of young girls on his computers hard drive.

In a press conference Jane Holl Lute, Assistant-Secretary-General for Field Support, addressed the issue of punishing troops, who must be tried by their home countries, responsible for the sexual abuse of children, stating that the UN was working to increase dialogue and that “We can’t let up. We need to be vigilant.”, until all Member States are seeing the same picture and solution. Lute also made the following statement in response to the report;

“Save the Children has been an effective partner with us in bringing their perspective — which is different from our own — to this problem,” she said, voicing agreement with its call for a better reporting mechanism for victims. “We need to work with community leaders so that children and those who are abused can come forward in safety.”

In response the UN will investigate the sex abuse report, as Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters he had “zero tolerance” for such behavior and said, “On all these cases which have been raised, we will very carefully investigate” and that the UN would take “necessary measures” where findings warrant.

The recent abuses and the longstanding impunity of those members of peacekeeping forces leave many to wonder who to trust and if there is any real safety from abuse. However the emergence of media and public outrage have once again thrust the issue into the spotlight and hope that the acknowledgment and punishment of those who have committed such grave crimes against vulnerable children will continue and we can brake the silence and impunity of abuse. Both the UN and International community must continues to take further steps to see that children, the most vulnerable victims of armed conflict, are adequately protected, which includes the prosecution of all predators, regardless of affiliation.