CHILDREN
Deployment of Children a War Crime, Says UNICEF
By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 15 (IPS) - The deployment of children in military conflicts should be designated a war crime, says the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF).
UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy wants the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC) to give ''a clear signal'' that atrocities committed against children in war zones will not go unpunished. ''It is unacceptable that places where children should be safe and protected are being targeted in hostilities,'' she says.
UNICEF has proposed that the ICC should act against recruitment regardless of whether children are used as front-line combatants or in support roles, such as messengers, drivers, cooks or in any other capacity. A month-long meeting to finalise the creation of ICC will begin in June in Rome.
Bellamy saysd children involved in military conflicts are usually vulnerable to the horrors of war and to manipulation by adult soldiers and commanders. ''To allow this to continue would constitute a complete violation of child rights.'' The Office of the U.N. Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict says that in the past decade alone, about two million children have been killed in armed conflicts. An estimated 250,000 children - some as young as eight years old - have been used as soldiers in some 30 theatres of conflict worlwide.
Additionally, 12 million were left homeless, and half of the world's estimated 53 million refugees and internally displaced persons were children, often orphaned. Moreover, civilians constituted up to 90 pecent of those affected by today's conflicts, as compared with five percent during the First World War.
''We are witnessing one of the most abominable crimes on the eve of a new millennium,'' says Olara Otunnu, the U.N.'s Special Representative.
Otunnu is planning to visit several countries where either governments or rebel groups are accused of abusing children at war. ''We have a very long list of countries where children are caught up in conflict situations,'' he says. Some of these countries include Sri Lanka, Liberia, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. UNICEF has recently focused on the plight of children in at least three other countries: Afghanistan, Uganda and Algeria.
Closely tied to the illegality of child recruitment is the issue of draft age. Bellamy says she is ''bitterly disappointed'' that the international community has yet to adopt an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to raise the minimum age of military recruitment, from 15 to 18. ''We still hope to achieve this optional protocol and that this change will be reflected in the statutes of the ICC.''
UNICEF has been involved in demobilising child soldiers in several recent conflict situations - in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The U.N. agency also has urged that inducement or coercion of children under 18 years of age into prostitution should be on the list of war crimes, along with murder, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and military attacks on schools.
UNICEF has urged that children below the age of 18 not be held criminally responsible for the kinds of serious crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction. ''The only children who might be involved in war crimes are those whose lives have been so shattered by adult violence that they could not, by any stretch of imagination, be held responsible,'' Bellamy declares. ''UNICEF rejects the notion that children should be brought before a court to answer for crimes perpetrated by adults - including recruitment of children in the first place.''
Additionally, UNICEF says that ICC statutes on death penalty, life imprisonment or long periods of incarceration not be applicable to children. Furthermore, it has also urged that children not be called as witnesses if it is against their best interest, and that child victims should be offered special protection during hearings.
According to the mandate given by the 185-member General Assembly, Otunnu said he will take concrete initiatives in particular cases; inform and mobilise international public opinion; ensure high priority for the welfare of children affected by armed conflict; and act as a catalyst among U.N. agencies and humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to develop a concerted and focused approach to meet the needs of children in conflict.
Otunnu plans to use as his primary guide a comprehensive 1996 report on ''Children in Armed Conflict'' authored by the former First Lady of Mozambique, Gracha Machel.
One of the key recommendations of her report was that the age of military recruitment should be raised to 18. ''No child under 18 should have any role in any armed force of any kind,'' Machel declared, adding that all children now in an armed force, whether governmental or non-governmental should be demobilised.
''By the year 2000, there should be strong public opinion against using children as soldiers, rape as a weapon of war and the use of landmines,'' she said. She also urged the Security Council to single out the protection of children when it adopted mandates for peacekeeping operations. (END/IPS/td/mk/98)