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Losing
battle to rescue child soldiers
By
Alan Boyd
SYDNEY - India does it. So do Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines,
East Timor and several Central Asian states. United
Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has labeled the
practice one of the most morally reprehensible acts of
systematic abuse worldwide, and even took the
extraordinary step of publicly naming the culprits last
year.
Yet at least 100,000 Asian children as
young as eight are still being coerced to fight for
government armies and armed rebel movements, according
to the latest report by Coalition to Stop the Use of
Child Soldiers, a global human-rights alliance.
As the UN Security Council met last week to
debate the predicament of children caught up in armed
conflict, there was a minefield of contention over the
dwindling prospects of a diplomatic solution.
"Adopting resolution after resolution which fail
to protect children from conflict has created
'resolution fatigue' among governments at the UN and
cynicism among the public," said Casey Kelso, the
coalition coordinator. "The test for the Security
Council is to hold these governments and groups
accountable for their actions."
Comprising eight
charities and human-rights groups, including Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, International Save
the Children Alliance and World Vision International,
the coalition reported a general deterioration last year
in the treatment of children in war zones.
In
Asia, children played a significant role in the
government forces of Afghanistan and Myanmar, with the
junta in Myanmar alone conscripting as many as 70,000
youths under the age of 18.
While the practice
was not condoned at an official level elsewhere on the
continent, paramilitary and rebel movements enlisted
scores of other children as soldiers, sexual slaves,
laborers, porters or spies on the Indian subcontinent
and in some parts of Southeast Asia.
A separate
study released by Annan ahead of the Security Council
debate cited Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, the
Philippines and Sri Lanka, but omitted India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Indonesia and East Timor.
"Exiled
children told of being abducted by government forces and
taken to military camps where they were subject to
beatings, forced labor and combat,? the human-rights
coalition said of Myanmar, where there was "little if
any progress? in ending the practice.
The
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) pledged to
demobilize children after a ceasefire two years ago in
Sri Lanka, Asia's other leading conflict zone, but has
released only 202 child fighters. The UN Children's Fund
(UNICEF) reported in another assessment this week that
the LTTE recruited 709 under-age fighters in 2003,
despite promises that it wouldn't enlist anyone below 18
years of age. While the average age of children utilized
by the LTTE is 15, some are as young as 10. The rebel
group claims that most enroll voluntarily to flee
poverty or abuse from government forces.
"Our
estimate is that there are 50,000 children of different
categories that are directly affected by the conflict,"
said Ted Chaiban, UNICEF's representative in Sri Lanka.
"I am speaking here of children engaged in child labor,
child soldiers, children that have been displaced
repeatedly, children victims of land mines."
It
is this social aspect, plus the logistical problem of
reaching remote opposition factions, that has proved the
biggest hurdle in shaping tougher measures against
states and groups that condone the use of child
soldiers.
A year ago the Security Council
pressed for an immediate halt to the use of child
soldiers by passing Resolution 1460, which identified 23
armed factions worldwide recruiting children and
calculated the number of victims at 300,000.
The
list has since grown to 54 warring parties in 15
conflicts, mostly in Africa and Asia. Conditions have
improved in only a few countries - notably Colombia,
Liberia and Burundi - and largely as a result of changed
domestic circumstances.
Activists charge that
Resolution 1460 was always doomed to fail because it
carried no penalties, reflecting a diplomatic reluctance
to impose economic sanctions that would be almost
impossible to enforce.
Another shortcoming is
that the resolution does not target those countries,
including a number of Security Council members, that
provide a political or military lifeline for regimes
accused of using child soldiers.
"Action must
also be taken against those indirectly involved through
tacit support for governments or armed groups, or via
the provision of arms and financial assistance,? said
Kelso, coordinator of the coalition to stop the use of
child combatants. "The council should act to end weapons
flows to violators and apply targeted sanctions to
parties that fail to end their use of child soldiers."
This week the Security Council began thrashing
out a new resolution that is expected to raise the tone
of the debate, though probably little else. One draft
prepared by France would establish a system to monitor
the use of children in conflict.
Germany is
pushing for the inclusion of other rights violations
such as rape and sex slavery, which it alleges are often
used as weapons of war in combination with murder and
mutilation.
But the UN again will be hamstrung
by a lack of consensus on how to impose punitive
measures, partly as a result of its inability to achieve
a comprehensive legal platform.
No fewer than
six international declarations have been issued on the
specific issue of children in conflicts since 1999,
culminating in a Child Soldiers Protocol that was signed
by 109 countries in 2002 after six years of difficult
negotiation. A minimum age of 18 was established for the
direct participation of children in hostilities, their
compulsory recruitment, enlistment or use in hostilities
by non-governmental armed groups - up from 15 years, the
previous threshhold.
However, the covenant has
been ratified only by a disappointing 67 countries
worldwide, including three in Asia - Sri Lanka,
Bangladesh and Vietnam - giving the UN limited
jurisdiction to take punitive action. In addition, it is
only an optional protocol to the wide-ranging Convention
on the Rights of the Child, which also covers the
involvement of children in armed conflict, and hence it
cannot be legally enforced.
The United States,
one of the five permanent members of the Security
Council, has not ratified either the convention or the
protocol, though the Senate has voted support for the
protocol. The United Kingdom, France, China and Russia,
which hold the other four permanent seats, have signed
but have not yet ratified the resolution.
One
possible reason for Washington's reticence is that it
has technically violated the protocol by incarcerating
at least three children as "enemy combatants" in a
military facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Detained
with more than 600 other terrorism suspects after the
2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the children are believed
to be aged between 13 and 15, while there is an
undetermined number in the 16-18 age bracket. None has
been charged with any crime.
With the UN in
effect sidelined, the task of implementing Resolution
1460 increasingly has fallen to activists who have even
less enforcement ability and are often seen as pursuing
their own agendas.
Myanmar, the Asian country on
the child soldier blacklist that is arguably most
vulnerable to UN sanctions, portrayed itself as a victim
of outside political pressures, in an angry retort to
the study by the human-rights coalition.
"The
report, without checking and verification, used
second-hand information provided by politically
motivated NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to
include Tatmadaw Kyi [the government army] in the list,"
the ruling junta said in a statement to the Security
Council.
"The preparation of the report as far
as Myanmar was concerned was very political and the
discussions were sometimes even acrimonious," the
government statement said. "No UN agency in Myanmar has
verified this allegation."
(Copyright 2004 Asia
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