Child soldiers in Monrovia, Liberia in 1996. The U.N. estimates that today, more than a quarter million children are fighting in conflicts around the world. (Photo by Reuters.)

 

 NEW YORK – It’s a shocking if familiar image, emblematic of vicious post-Cold War conflicts: boys high on drugs, slinging automatic rifles over their slender shoulders, maiming and killing for rebel movements or even for governments.

 

For just over a decade, the United Nations and its partners have made a concerted effort to end the use of child soldiers.

 

But still the problem persists. The U.N. used to offer a rough figure of 250,000 children under the command of armed groups worldwide, but now it cautions that the figure may be an underestimate and is impossible to verify. It cites advocacy and the end of some of the worst conflicts, including Sierra Leone and Liberia, as reason to believe the number of fighters under age 18 has declined somewhat.

 

As child protection specialists work on the issues, questions arise: What have they accomplished? Why is progress so difficult? What more can be done?

 

“There is a much greater engagement of the U.N., particularly the Security Council” than in the past, says Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. But getting violators to stop is a tougher problem.

 

The U.N. began to focus on children harmed by conflict in the early 1990s as it recognized changes in the nature of warfare. Instead of trained armies fighting one another, armed groups targeted civilians and recruited or abducted children to commit atrocities, serve as sex slaves, or both. The proliferation of AK-47 rifles and other weapons light enough for young bodies has turned children into a new kind of force — fearless, often drugged, obedient and plentiful.

 

In response, Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1993 appointed Mozambique’s former first lady Graça Machel to investigate the effects of war on children. Her 1996 report galvanized the U.N. system.

 

In 1998, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Olara Otunnu, a former Ugandan ambassador, as its first special representative on children and armed conflict. Radhika Coomaraswamy, former chair of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission, succeeded him in 2006. Machel, Otunnu and Coomaraswamy all come from countries ripped apart by conflict.

 

Coomaraswamy says Machel’s report shed light on suffering that had been “completely invisible” in world politics — despite the killing of two million children and permanent disabling of six million others during the decade before the 1996 report.

 

Under a provision of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, 130 of the U.N.’s 192 member states have pledged not to use anyone under age 18 in hostilities.

 

“In 10 years, we have really had an articulation of standards on this issue at the international level,” Coomaraswamy says. “We have managed to get the Security Council engaged in this process.”

 

The Machel report and Otunnu’s efforts helped persuade the council to get involved. While some member states considered it a human rights issue, and therefore not a Security Council responsibility, others came to see engagement as imperative.

 

In 2005, the council passed a resolution condemning the use of child soldiers and establishing a system to monitor and report on abuses against children in armed conflict. The council has helped make this a priority issue throughout the U.N. and has added child protection responsibilities to peacekeeping missions.

 

The council has defined six grave violations against children during conflict: killing or maiming, using under-age soldiers, committing sexual violence against children, abducting children, attacking hospitals and schools, and denying humanitarian aid. Initially, it deemed that only one of these violations — the use of under-age soldiers — would trigger monitoring. In August 2009, however, a council resolution expanded that provision to add sexual violence and killing or maiming as triggers for investigations.

 

Claude Heller, Mexico’s ambassador to the U.N. and current chair of the council’s Working Group on Children and Armed Conflict, says Mexico pushed for the 2009 resolution because child soldiers were always just one part of the problem. In May, the council visited eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where sexual violence against civilians, including children, is rampant.

 

The Security Council has the power to “name and shame” violators, refer cases to the International Criminal Court and impose sanctions that target offenders. The ICC’s cases concerning child soldiers in Uganda and Congo were referred by those governments, not the council.

 

The Working Group coordinates with Coomaraswamy’s office, UNICEF, peacekeeping missions and others to get violators to agree to end abuses.

 

The U.N.’s 2009 report covers 56 parties in 20 conflicts, including Burundi, Congo, Myanmar, Nepal and Sudan. It lists action plans with armed groups in Cote d’Ivoire and Central African Republic, negotiations with other groups, and 19 persistent violators, including some government forces.

 

Heller says the worst violators, such as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, seem undeterred by being named or threatened with prosecution, but others choose to negotiate. Uganda’s government, for instance, earned removal from the list.

 

Coomaraswamy and other child protection specialists say sanctions could be effective, if only the council would impose them. The August resolution links the Working Group and the council’s existing sanctions committees.

 

“The problem I see,” Heller says, “is that the machinery is very slow. It takes a lot of time to react to the situation.” He says he is determined to make that machinery work.

 

Coomaraswamy sees another challenge — getting through to those who commit war crimes. She tries to get access to armed groups, explain that their actions are crimes and then negotiate an end to violations. Her office works with human rights groups and others in the field on ways to verify whether armed groups comply with international standards, including on sexual violence, maiming and killing of children.

 

“Some perpetrators don’t give a damn about the international community. Al Qaeda is the extreme example,” she says. “But there are quite a few that care, that don’t want to be listed.”

 

With other perpetrators, Heller says, negotiations can be “very delicate” because governments — Colombia, for example — don’t want rebels to gain legitimacy through talks with the U.N.

 

For Pernille Ironside, a global specialist on child protection at UNICEF, winning the release of children from armed groups is a big achievement but helping them rejoin their communities remains difficult.

 

Ironside says the U.N. has secured the release of 12,600 children, including 1,648 girls, in nine countries since the start of 2008. Some 7,500 of them were released in eastern Congo, where she served for the past four years; 33,000 children have been released there since 2005.

 

UNICEF, the U.N. Children’s fund, works on reintegrating children. Ironside sees two main concerns: Children, especially girls, are often excluded from programs to disarm and reintegrate former combatants, and reintegration requires a community-based approach so that former child soldiers or victims of sexual abuse can avoid stigmatization.

 

World Vision, a non-profit group, has helped reintegrate more than 15,000 children and adults in northern Uganda since 1995, says Rory Anderson, World Vision USA’s deputy advocacy director.

 

The challenges she sees include working in ongoing conflict zones, helping girls re-enter society after sexual violence, overcoming limited educational and economic opportunities, and combating impunity for violators. On the plus side, she lists recent U.S. legislation to help prevent or punish the use child soldiers.

 

The American Civil Liberties Union, calling on the U.S. to live up to international standards, recently requested information from the Defense Department on juveniles the U.S. military is holding in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 

At Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, a coalition of non-profit groups, Yvonne Kemper and Simar Singh say the Security Council’s tools for protecting children — sanctions, action plans with perpetrators and referral to the International Criminal Court — do help.

 

So far, it appears that cracking down on violators is yielding results beyond the specific cases being prosecuted. Since the ICC’s 2006 arrest warrant for Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga, who is now on trial on charges of conscripting children younger than 15, other armed groups have been “really eager to engage the U.N. on action plans,” Kemper says. Adding child protection officers to peacekeeping teams puts the issue front and center, she notes, but more is needed, especially political commitment and measures to stop the proliferation of light weapons.

 

Becker of Human Rights Watch sees the ICC’s 2005 indictment of Joseph Kony, the Ugandan rebel leader, as an important part of the effort to end impunity, even though Kony is at large and quit peace talks.

 

“What we have seen from experience is that justice is a prerequisite for enduring peace,” she says.

 

Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative, says the old pattern of children forced to fight for armed groups is fading. The emerging pattern — children who join armed groups because of poverty, ethnic loyalty or enticement to become suicide bombers — is harder to thwart.

 

She and other child protection specialists say the international effort needs to expand toward ending abductions, attacks on schools and hospitals, and denial of humanitarian assistance — the other three grave violations against children.

 

http://www.globalpost.com/passport/foreign-desk/091124/young-armed-and-deadly