Armed Conflict CRINmail 183:
In this issue:
This month’s CRINmail reflects on the violence that has spread throughout the world in recent weeks. Brutal fighting in Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Nigeria and Kenya has not spared children and is having a devastating impact on their lives. Hundreds are dying, with many more injured and displaced, while those responsible escape with impunity. Perpetrators of violations of children’s rights in times of armed conflict must be prosecuted to ensure victims obtain justice and reparation.
On a more positive note, some efforts were noted to protect children involved in armed conflict.
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A 72-hour ceasefire in Gaza brokered by Egypt ended this morning with the failure to reach an agreement during the Egyptian-mediated talks aimed at finding a durable solution to the month-long fighting.
Since the start of operation ‘Protective Edge’ by the Israeli Defence Forces in the Gaza Strip on 8 July, at least 1,875 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed and 67 people, including 64 soldiers, have died on the Israeli side. According to UNICEF, by August 4, 408 Palestinian children were reported to have been killed, making up 31 percent of all civilian casualties. More than 70 percent of the 251 boys and 157 girls killed were aged 12 or younger.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the deaths in Gaza "have shocked and shamed the world".
While Israel is calling for demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip, Hamas wants the Israeli blockade on Gaza lifted, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Schools - including UN schools, health facilities, and family homes in the Gaza Strip have been especially hard hit by Israeli rocket fire, often without warning or insufficient warning to give residents enough time to evacuate.
A second UN school serving as a shelter for 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza was hit last week by Israeli artillery, killing at least 16 civilians, according to an initial assessment by the UN. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) Commissioner General, Pierre Krähenbühl, called the attack “an affront to all of us; a source of universal shame.”
Failing to agree on a binding resolution, the UN Security Council adopted a non-binding presidential statement on 28 July, expressing strong support for the calls by the Secretary-General and others for an immediate and unconditional humanitarian ceasefire.
At the end of the UN Human Rights Council’s special session on 23 July, the 47-members adopted a resolution presented by Palestinians by a vote of 29 States in favour, one against (the United States) with 17 abstentions (including some European Union members). The resolutions called for the urgent dispatch of "an independent, international commission of inquiry" to investigate "all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip". In the resolution, the Council also demanded that Israel immediately reopen the occupied Gaza Strip and called upon the international community to provide urgently needed humanitarian assistance and services to the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay said that there is a “strong possibility” that Israel is violating international law and may be committing war crimes in Gaza, in reference to the killing of children and house demolitions. She also condemned Hamas and other armed groups, for their "indiscriminate attacks" on Israel.
Government troops and rebel armed groups have been fighting in Ukraine since April in a war in the Russian-speaking east of the country. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says more than 1,100 people including government forces, rebels and civilians have died.
According to Human Rights Watch, unguided Grad rockets - rockets that cannot be targeted accurately - launched apparently by Ukrainian government forces and pro-government militias have killed at least 16 civilians and wounded many more in insurgent-controlled areas of Donetsk and its suburbs in at least four attacks between July 12 and 21, 2014. The use of indiscriminate rockets in populated areas violates international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes.
Fighting has intensified since the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner last month, killing all 298 people on board, including 80 children. The downing of the plane in Ukraine may amount to a war crime given the prevailing conflict situation, according to Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Iraqi government forces continue to battle Sunni rebels, led by the jihadist group, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) - now called Islamic State. ISIS-led forces took control of a number of cities in Iraq in a rapid advance during the second week of June.
ISIS has been killing, kidnapping, and threatening religious and ethnic minorities since mid June. The armed Sunni extremist group has seized hundreds of Turkmen, Shabaks, and Yazidis, killed many of them, and ordered all Christians to convert to Islam, pay “tribute” money, or leave Mosul by July 19.
Sinjar, a district of Ninewa in northwest Iraq with a population of at least 150,000 children – including many who are internally displaced – was taken over by ISIS on Sunday. UNICEF expressed “extreme concern” over reports that some 40 children from the Yazidi minority group died as a result of the violence being carried out in Sinjar by armed groups.
“The civilians trapped in the mountain area are not only at risk of being killed or abducted by ISIS; they are also suffering from a lack of water, food and medical care. They are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser, who is currently in northern Iraq.
According to Amnesty International, hundreds of missing civilians, mainly men but also women and children, are reported to have been killed or abducted.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch reported that government forces launched attacks against ISIS while trying to retake areas controlled by ISIS fighters and other Sunni armed groups. But human rights groups say the indiscriminate nature of these attacks violates international law, “The Iraqi government may be fighting a vicious insurgency, but that’s no license to kill civilians anywhere they think ISIS might be lurking,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The government’s airstrikes are wreaking an awful toll on ordinary residents.”
Libya is experiencing its worst violence since the 2011 uprising that overturned former leader Muammar Gaddafi. Islamist militias from Misrata led an assault on the airport this week, in an attempt to seize it from militias from the town of Zintan. More than 200 people have been killed in the recent fighting in Tripoli and the eastern city of Benghazi.
The battle for the airport is part of a wider political struggle between two factions of ex-rebels and their political allies who once fought together against Gaddafi, but whose rivalries exploded over the spoils of post-war Libya. On one side are the Zintan brigades - based in the city some 130 km (80 miles) southwest of Tripoli - along with their anti-Islamist Qaaqaa and Al-Sawaiq fighters, including some ex-Gaddafi forces, and political allies. Pitted against them are fighters loyal to the western port of Misrata who are allied with the Islamist Justice and Construction party, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Amid the ongoing fighting, a newly elected Libyan parliament met for the first time this week. It is hoped that the political leaders can bring peace and democracy to the North African nation.
The UN expressed its concern for the safety of thousands of refugees and asylum-seekers who are currently stranded in areas heavily damaged by the fighting.
“We are [...] receiving calls from many of the mainly Syrian and Palestinian asylum-seekers and refugees in Benghazi who are in dire need of assistance,” UN Refugee Agency spokesperson Ariane Rummery told journalists in Geneva, adding that in total, almost 37,000 people are registered with UNHCR in Tripoli and Benghazi.
According to Human Rights Watch, guards in migrant detention centres under Libyan government control have tortured and otherwise abused migrants and those seeking asylum, including with severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks. In June, the organisation released preliminary findings from its April 2014 investigation in the country which included interviews with 138 detainees, almost 100 of whom reported torture and other abuses. The findings report alleged abuses, massive overcrowding, dire sanitation conditions, and lack of access to adequate medical care in eight of the nine centres visited by Human Rights Watch.
Syria's war - well into its fourth year and with no end in sight - is having a devastating impact on the lives of the country's children. Tens of thousands have been killed or wounded. Many more are deeply traumatised. In a new documentary, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet follows the lives of six children over six months.
Filmed in Damascus, Homs and among the refugee community in Turkey, their stories offer an insight into a country being torn apart.
The presence of armed groups and fighting continues to cause displacement across the Central African Republic (CAR). This has led to an escalation of insecurity leaving women and girls vulnerable to forced marriage and extreme violence, including rape. Despite recent commitments from governments, UN agencies and NGOs to prioritise protecting women and girls from sexual and physical violence, current efforts in CAR remain underfunded. In the capital Bangui less than one third of clinics and health centres in internally displaced sites have the means to assist survivors of gender-based violence.
An estimated 1.5 million people have been uprooted in South Sudan in the fighting that started with a political impasse in mid-December 2013 between President Salva Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar. The conflict also sent nearly 100,000 civilians fleeing to UN bases around the country.
Assistant Secretary-General for UN Peacekeeping Operations, Edmond Mulet warned that after just three years of independence, South Sudan is now on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe and a protracted internal conflict.
Some 3.9 million civilians are facing alarming levels of food insecurity, amidst growing concerns of a famine. Meanwhile, among the more than one million people who have been internally displaced by violence, some 434,000 have fled across borders. Up to 50,000 children are at risk of dying as a consequence of acute malnutrition this year alone. And the cholera epidemic continues to grow with more than 5,300 cases and 115 deaths.
More than 4,000 people have been killed this year alone in the conflict between the Nigerian military and Boko Haram - an islamist armed group, including more than 600 victims of extrajudicial executions following an attack by Boko Haram gunmen on military barracks in Maiduguri, Borno state on 14 March.
In recent months, the conflict has intensified in north-eastern Nigeria, spreading to smaller towns and villages. In July 2014, Damboa in Borno state became the first town to fall under the control of Boko Haram since President Goodluck Jonathan declared a State of Emergency in May 2013.
Amnesty International has gathered gruesome video footage, images and testimonies that provide evidence of war crimes, including extrajudicial executions, and other serious human rights violations being carried out in north-eastern Nigeria as the fight by the military against Boko Haram and other armed groups intensifies.
The UN refugee agency sounded the alarm this week on behalf of the nearly 1,000 people who recently arrived in the uninhabited Chadian island of Choua after fleeing the fighting. Refugees arriving there reported that they have fled violence and attacks on their village that resulted in the destruction of their houses and food reserves. The group, which included mainly women and children, is in urgent need of food, water, shelter and medical care.
A string of attacks by gunmen on communities in Kenya’s southeastern Coast Province over the past six weeks has left more than 100 people dead, and the real fear of yet more violence to come. There is also a general agreement that the cause of the violence is “politics and land”. But the consensus about who is behind the attacks, and why, is more uncertain. According to Hussein Khalid, executive director of the Mombasa-based human rights group Haki Africa, the evidence points to a unit of al-Shabab that includes local recruits, which is cleverly playing on the region’s social and economic tensions.
The recruitment and use of children by armed groups remained endemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) between 2010 and 2013, according to a new UN report, which cited impunity as a major factor in the ongoing abuses.
“Impunity has encouraged perpetrators to continue their violations against children,” Leila Zerrougui, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, told the Security Council Working Group on children and armed conflict earlier this month.
Delivering a briefing on the 5th Report on Children and Armed Conflict in DRC, she said there were close to 4,200 cases of recruitment and use of boys and girls by armed groups and the Government’s armed forces. One third of the cases involved children below the age of 15.
Finally, to end on a less bleak note, the governments of Afghanistan and Myanmar and the Free Syrian Army have taken some positive steps to protect children involved in armed conflict.
Afghanistan endorsed a Road Map that includes steps to release all underage recruits, and establish a system to investigate, prosecute and take disciplinary action against those responsible for the recruitment of children under 18.
Myanmar released dozens of children and young adults from its armed forces, who are expected to be enrolled in school immediately. The government signed an action plan in June 2012 to break the ties between children and the forces. The action plan sets a timetable and measurable activities for the release and reintegration of children associated with Government armed forces, as well as the prevention of further recruitment.
In a communiqué annexed to a letter sent to the UN Security Council, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces and the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) pledged to issue command orders to FSA units banning the recruitment and use of children and to enforce disciplinary measures against child recruiters. The Free Syrian Army has expressed its readiness to collaborate with the UN to develop an action plan detailing concrete measures and activities to end and prevent underage recruitment, as well as other grave violations against children.
In cooperation with UNICEF Chad, Child Soldiers International has created a booklet illustrated by a Chadian artist, which outlines key concepts relating to children’s rights and child recruitment. It focuses on international laws applicable in Chad as well as Chadian national and military policies prohibiting the military recruitment and use of children in armed conflict.
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Closing
“Impunity has encouraged perpetrators to continue their violations against children,”
Leila Zerrougui, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict during a briefing on the 5th Report on Children and Armed Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo on 21 July 2014.
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