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The UN warned, during the International Day against the Use of Child Soldiers, that children are becoming increasingly vulnerable to recruitment and deployment by armed groups, as the world’s conflicts become more brutal, intense and widespread.
”Out of 59 parties to conflicts identified by the Secretary-General for grave violations against children, 57 are named because they are recruiting and using child[ren]”, said Leila Zerrougui, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.
Tens of thousands of boys and girls are associated with armed forces and armed groups in conflicts in over 20 countries around the world. Many have been victims of, witness to and forced participants in acts of unspeakable brutality.
In Afghanistan, despite progress to end the recruitment and use of children in national security forces, children continue to be recruited by parties to conflict such as the Haqqani Network and the Taliban. In the most extreme cases, children have been used as suicide bombers, to make weapons and transport explosives.
In the Central African Republic, boys and girls as young as eight years old were recruited and used by all parties to the conflict to take direct part in inter-ethnic and religious violence.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations documented new cases of recruitment of children by multiple armed groups operating in the eastern part of the country. The children, in some cases as young as 10, were recruited and used as combatants, or in support functions such as porters and cooks. Girls were reportedly used as sex slaves or were victims of other forms of sexual violence.
In Iraq and Syria, the advances by IS and the proliferation of armed groups have made children even more vulnerable to recruitment. Children as young as 12, are undergoing military training and have been used as informants, to patrol, to man checkpoints and to guard strategic locations. In some cases, they have been used as suicide bombers and to carry out executions.
The starting point for ending the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict is the law. But laws in some countries continue to allow or actively promote the recruitment of children under 18.
North Korea is making military service mandatory for young women in a bid to strengthen the nation’s armed forces.
The measure is said to apply to women aged between 17 and 20, and has been handed down to mobilisation offices in each province, city, and county. Implementation is reported to be already underway.
Customarily, enlistment in North Korea occurs twice a year in April and August, and up until now, women served on a voluntarily basis, while men invariably underwent mandatory service.
Meanwhile the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) announced they will no longer recruit children below the age of 17. The former minimum age of recruitment was set at 15 years of age.
Even though the FARC spokesperson denied the armed group forcibly recruited children, the Colombian government says it has rescued almost 6,000 former child soldiers in the last 15 years. The defence ministry said most of the children they had rescued had been between 16 and 17 years old, but 30 percent of the rescued children were boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 15.
Read a briefing on the armed conflict in Colombia and its impact on children.
A new report by Child Soldiers International, Under the radar: Ongoing recruitment and use of children by the Myanmar army, has found that military officers and civilian ‘brokers’ in Myanmar continue to use deliberate misrepresentation to entice new recruits, including children.
While some important steps have been taken since the government signed the June 2012 Joint Action Plan with the UN, research conducted by Child Soldiers International found that children below 18 years of age continue to be forcibly recruited and used in the Tatmadaw Kyi, the Myanmar army.
Poor and uneducated boys are frequently intimidated and coerced. A commonly deployed tactic is to offer a child a good job with a decent salary (for instance as a driver) and lure them to the nearest recruitment centre or battalion.
The Myanmar military has taken some form of disciplinary action in cases of child recruitment brought to their attention: since 2007, 312 perpetrators have been held to account, including 48 officers. Punishments have ranged from warnings, reduction in salary, denial of promotion, and imprisonment for up to three months. However, only a handful of prosecutions have been initiated against civilians, including brokers, who play an important role in luring children into recruitment.
Last month the Houthi rebel group in Yemen forced the government to resign and appointed a new parliament – which has been declared illegitimate by the UN.
According to Leila Zerrougui, the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, the coming to power of northern rebels could derail moves to end the use of child soldiers in the country.
The Houthis have been active since mid-2004 in the northern governorate of Sa’da, near the border with Saudi Arabia. The armed group has fought the Yemeni government forces and pro-government tribal fighters through six rounds of fighting before taking over the capital Sana’a in January.
The Houthi movement, like many Yemeni rebel groups, has long been accused of routinely using children in its ranks. A 2010 report from the UN found that “as many as half of the total number of fighters, from the Al-Houthi rebels, are below 18 years of age.”
Leila Zerrougui said that Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi had pledged to help protect children from conflict in 2012 but has since appeared to reverse his position. “In 2014, Al-Houthi has increased the recruitment of children as well as other grave violations against children,” she said.
She added that the number of children killed or maimed in violence spiked last year.
Yemen is one of only eight countries in the world whose state militaries the UN says include children.
Last year Yemen signed up to an action plan to end the recruitment of children by the army. Yet with the Houthis having seized control of state institutions it is unclear if the action plan will continue or how much control they now have over the army.
Despite a recent peace deal between the warring factions in South Sudan that had fostered hope of a definitive end to the year-long conflict, attacks against civilians persist.
According to the UN, armed groups raided a school on Saturday and seized 89 children.
The abduction occurred near Malakal, where thousands of people have taken refuge.
The kidnappers conducted house-to-house searches, according to UNICEF.
The security situation in South Sudan deteriorated steadily over the past year since political in-fighting between South Sudan's President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, started in mid-December 2013.
Last month, UNICEF celebrated the release of 300 children from an armed group in Pibor, Jonglei State, in the east of South Sudan. According to the UN, 249 children aged between 11 and 17 were released in the country’s Gumuruk. Among them, 179 have returned home to their families while 70 remain in a UNICEF-supported interim care centre.
A UN report published at the end of last year outlined grave violations of children’s rights in South Sudan, saying thousands of child soldiers were seen with state and non-state armed groups between December 2013 and September 2014. The report said that the use and recruitment of 561 children had been documented by UN child protection actors since the beginning of the conflict.
Additionally, in a new study released last week, Human Rights Watch reported that the South Sudanese government forces are actively recruiting boys as young as 13, often by force, as soldiers in Malakal, Upper Nile state.
Opposition forces have also recruited and used many children. Over the past months Human Rights Watch has spoken to about a dozen children or young men who were under 18 years of age when they fought in 2014, who have been used by opposition forces in battles and for other purposes such as cooking and carrying water and ammunition.
Despite the signing of the ceasefire in Ukraine, fighting continues in certain parts of the country, including around the rebel-held city of Donetsk.
The joint statement, adopted by Vladimir Putin, Petro Poroshenko, Angela Merkel, and Francois Hollande, commits their respective countries to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and seek a diplomatic solution to the crisis. The agreement also lays out timetables and step-by-step conditions for the implementation of a peace deal, starting with a general ceasefire from midnight on the 14th to 15th of February.
In late February 2014, the situation in Ukraine transcended what was initially seen as an internal Ukrainian political crisis into violent clashes in parts of the country, later reaching full-scale conflict in the east. Since the beginning of the conflict, over one million people have been displaced within Ukraine. Of these, more than 134,000 are children. As of last month, at least 5,486 people were killed and 12,972 wounded in eastern Ukraine and 600,000 fled to neighbouring countries, of whom more than 400,000 have gone to Russia.
In a press release issued at the end of January, UNICEF noted that since September 2014, thousands of people in Donetsk had been spending most of their days and nights in bomb shelters with little or no access to water, hygiene, sanitation or food. Among them were an estimated 1,000 children who regularly sought refuge from the heavy shelling.
The National Transition Council for the Central African Republic (CAR) is in discussions to create a Special Criminal Court. A draft law has been negotiated between the UN and the government and is being presented to the transitional parliament.
The law will establish a court of Central African judges and prosecutors, with support from members of the international judicial community, to assist with the complexities of prosecuting the serious international crimes committed in the conflict.
Since March 2013, when mainly Muslim Séléka rebels seized control of the majority Christian country, thousands of people have been killed in religious fighting, and about a million people have been displaced from their homes. The Séléka withdrew to the north-east last year, after international pressure and violence by mainly Christian anti-balaka militias.
Since the ceasefire in July 2014 and the withdrawal of the Séléka to the north-east last year, although there have been no direct clashes between major parties, attacks on civilians continue. Revenge attacks have become a significant aspect of the ongoing conflict, and combatants continue to pose a significant threats to peace.
A recent report published by Save the Children suggests that the number of boys and girls being recruited rapidly increased from around 2,500 in 2012, to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 in 2014.
According the Secretary General’s report on Children and Armed Conflict, 44 percent of the CAR population has experienced sexual violence, and a large proportion of the victims are children. Children are also among the thousands killed and forcefully displaced in the conflict. Schools and hospitals have been subject to attacks, and malnutrition has reached emergency levels.
In November 2014, we reported in this CRINmail that Sudanese troops have denied access to the joint UN and African Union peacekeeping mission, UNAMID, to Tabit, a town in the country’s western Darfur region to investigate reports of an alleged mass rape of about 200 women and girls.
Human Rights Watch was able to investigate the allegations and document in a report the attacks by the Sudanese army. The report says that at least 221 women and girls were raped in Tabit over 36 hours beginning on October 30, 2014.
Sudanese army forces carried out three distinct military operations during which soldiers went house-to-house and looted property, arrested men, beat residents, and raped women and girls inside their homes. Human Rights Watch documented 27 separate incidents of rape, and obtained credible information about an additional 194 cases. Two army defectors separately told the organisation that their superior officers had ordered them to “rape women.”
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Closing
On Wednesday 21 January, news broke that a 14-year-old girl from Ramallah had been sentenced to two months in prison and fined $1,528 by an Israeli military court. She was arrested on 31 December and charged with throwing stones, obstructing the road and possession of a knife and detained for 22 days inside Israel before the court issued the sentence.
This story captured the attention of the news: the plight of this one girl put a face on a system that routinely runs roughshod over children’s rights. But behind this story there is a broader issue.
Every year 700 children are arrested, detained and face ill-treatment in the Israeli military justice system. During 2014, an average of 197 children were held in military detention every month; 13 percent of whom are under the age of 16. In the last decade, an estimated 7,000 children have been held under military detention, the majority for security offences.
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