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Around 500,000 children live in 16 besieged areas across Syria according to UNICEF, almost completely cut off from sustained humanitarian aid and basic services. Some communities have received little to no aid in nearly two years. In eastern Aleppo alone, the agency estimates that 100,000 children are living under siege.
Returning from a mission to Aleppo, Hanna Singer, a senior UNICEF official, described “haunting images” of children killed by mortars and malnourishment, and said that the terrible situation “continues to plummet to even greater lows.” She further said that some 31,500 people have been displaced from eastern Aleppo in recent days and that based on latest estimates, at least half of them seem to be children.
So far this year there have been 84 attacks on schools in Syria with at least 69 children killed and many others injured while at school, Ms. Singer underscored.
Since the crisis erupted in 2011, the humanitarian situation in the country has been in a downward spiral with more than 13.5 million Syrians now in need of humanitarian assistance and nearly 6.3 million people internally displaced. More than four million Syrians have been driven out of the country as refugees, including hundreds of thousands now residing in Europe.
The conflict has also killed hundreds of thousands of people, including many children. Almost a million people (974,080) remain trapped in besieged areas and nearly 3.9 million people in hard-to-reach areas.
Expressing “outrage” at the escalation of violence in the country, particularly war-battered Aleppo, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding an immediate and complete end to all attacks on civilians as well as an end to all sieges in the country. Action in the Assembly comes just days after the UN Security Council failed to adopt a similar resolution demanding a ceasefire in Aleppo, as two of its permanent members, China and Russia, used their vetoes to kill the debate.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) expressed alarm over reports of serious rights violations in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state that cite allegations of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests and sexual violence, and a renewed spike in hate speech – including on social media.
The latest outbreak of violence comes nearly two months after the government claimed Rohingya fighters launched an attack on a Myanmar border guard post. In reality no one has claimed responsibility for this attack. The ambush left nine officers dead and unleashed a brutal counterinsurgency operation which, according to official numbers, has killed more than 100 Muslims from the Rohingya minority.
UNICEF has called upon the Government to protect affected children from all forms of violence and to support prompt and independent investigations into reports of grave violations against them.
According to the agency, worsening inter-communal conflict in Rakhine state is taking a terrible toll on children – especially those living in the northern part of the state, where thousands of under-18s have been cut off from humanitarian assistance in recent weeks.
In June, a UN report had documented a wide range of human rights violations and abuses against the Rohingya Muslims, including arbitrary deprivation of nationality, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, threats to life and security, denial of rights to health and education, forced labour, sexual violence and limitations to political rights. It also raised the possibility that the pattern of violations against the Rohingya may amount to crimes against humanity.
Since 2011, the conflict in Sudan’s Southern Kordofan province between the government of Sudan and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) has resulted in the killing, injury and displacement of thousands of civilians, including children. The direct impact of the war on the civilian population has been exacerbated by the government preventing those in need from accessing humanitarian assistance.
According to a report by the National Human Rights Monitors Organisation (NHRMO) and the Sudan Consortium, the government of Sudan is responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations, for the most part through its indiscriminate and deliberate aerial bombardments.
According to the report, over the past five years, NHRMO and the Sudan Consortium have collected evidence of a total of 68 children killed and over 110 injured, with thousands more internally displaced or in refugee camps in South Sudan. From January to June 2016, 7,500 people fled Southern Kordofan towards South Sudan, nearly 3,000 of whom arrived during May. Nearly 90 percent were women and children, and 10 percent of the children were traveling alone or without a family member.
With “many of the warning signals of impending genocide” already present in South Sudan and amid widespread rape of women and girls, a team of UN human rights experts called on the international community to take immediate action to avert mass bloodshed, as they wrapped up a ten-day visit to the crisis-riven country. “The stage is being set for a repeat of what happened in Rwanda and the international community is under an obligation to prevent it,” said the Chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, Yasmin Sooka.
“There is already a steady process of ethnic cleansing underway in several areas of South Sudan using starvation, gang rape and the burning of villages; everywhere we went across this country we heard villagers saying they are ready to shed blood to get their land back,” she reported, adding that many people the experts met during their visit said “it has already reached a point of no return.”
“The scale of rape of women and girls perpetrated by all armed groups in South Sudan is utterly unacceptable and is frankly mindboggling,” she continued, adding that aid workers told the experts that gang rape is so prevalent that it has become ‘normal.’
The Commission states that it is widely believed that fighting will intensify during the dry season, which runs until the end of February. To avert mass bloodshed the UN experts implored the international community to: expedite the immediate arrival of the 4,000-strong Regional Protection Force in South Sudan; ensure that the force is not restricted only to the capital; freeze assets; enact targeted sanctions; and implement an arms embargo.
Former Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) commander, Dominic Ongwen, has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him on the opening day of his trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC). The trial of is one of the most momentous in the ICC’s 14-year history, and raises difficult questions of responsibility and blame. Ongwen is the first former child soldier to face trial at the ICC and the first defendant to be an alleged perpetrator and victim of the same type of crimes.
While defence lawyers will argue that much of the evidence against Ongwen is unreliable and say their client was brutalised and traumatised after being abducted, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the court that past victimisation as a child might be a mitigating factor in sentencing but was not a defence of Ongwen’s alleged decision to “wholeheartedly” embrace violence.
According to Child Soldiers International “Mr Ongwen should not avoid justice because of his childhood experiences. However, it would be a potential injustice not to take into account his traumatic experiences when determining an appropriate sentence, should he be found guilty.”
The fact that Ongwen was a victim of a war crime “is not a defence in itself. Many perpetrators have been victims at some point in their lives and one cannot simply erase their criminal responsibility on that basis. However, his status as a former child soldier may be relevant at the sentencing stage as a personal mitigating circumstance, should he be found guilty.”
Two former child soldiers have threatened legal action against the private security company Aegis Defence Services over psychological harm they say they suffered when the company recruited them as adults to work as mercenaries in Iraq. The men were recruited as child soldiers in Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war, which ended in 2002. Years later, as adults, they were hired to work as security guards for Aegis in Iraq.
Aegis, which is chaired by Tory MP Sir Nicholas Soames, won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to provide security to US military bases during and after the Iraq war. The company was taken over last year by the Canadian security company GardaWorld.
The men have sent a letter before action to Aegis saying their experiences in Iraq compounded the psychological harm they had already suffered in childhood, marking the first step towards launching a civil claim for damages. In April a Danish documentary alleged that former child soldiers were among the 2,500 personnel recruited from Sierra Leone to work in Iraq by Aegis and other security companies for as little as $16 (£13) a day.
The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) has signed an Action Plan with the UN to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children in conflict. The Action Plan includes a series of measures to end and prevent the recruitment, use and association of all under-18s with the SPLM-N. The SPLM-N committed to ensure the release of children present in their ranks and take the necessary measures to halt child recruitment and use. They also pledged to facilitate the reintegration of the children in their communities.
The Government of Sudan had also signed an agreement in March 2016 with the UN to prevent the recruitment and use of children by national security forces. The action plan sets out a series of measures to enhance the overall protection of children affected by armed conflict, including the cessation and prevention of child recruitment, and the release of childrenfrom national security forces.
Also on Sudan, President Omar Al Bashir was seen in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), for the Formula 1 race and in Morocco for the UN climate change conference (COP22). The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued two arrest warrants against President al-Bashir in 2009 and 2010 for alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide committed in Darfur. However, he has continued to travel freely in Africa, Arab countries and Asia, defying the ICC arrest warrants, including in countries that are parties to the ICC’s Rome Statute.
Two girls said to be aged seven or eight have been used to bomb a market in north-east Nigeria, killing at least one other person and wounding 18. Police in the town of Maiduguri, Borno state, say the attack happened when the market was crowded with shoppers. The girls detonated their explosives minutes apart, witnesses said. Both were killed.
No group has said it was behind the bombings but Boko Haram militants have carried out similar attacks. In the past few months, the Nigerian army has made gains against the group but the group still carries out regular bombings. Boko Haram has been active in Nigeria since 2009 in a violent campaign against the government in a bid to impose Islamic law, mostly in the northeast of the country.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor opened a preliminary examination of the situation in Nigeria in November 2010 and is yet to take a decision on whether or not to open an investigation. The prosecutor’s current analysis is focused on assessing whether Nigerian authorities are conducting adequate domestic proceedings in relation to the crimes allegedly committed by Boko Haram. Residents of villages and towns ravaged by Boko Haram attacks say that the government has failed at both preventing attacks where women and girls were abducted, and in protecting those in imminent danger.
The armed conflict in Colombia has prevented children living in rural areas from going to school, according to a new report by the Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution (NOREF) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
Large parts of the population in the country have been forced to flee their homes because of violence and historically, the rural areas have been those most affected by the conflict. In addition, abruptions in the school year, poverty, long distances between schools and homes and lack of teachers are among the main reasons why children in these areas do not attend school. Colombia’s rural areas include 30 percent of the national population. In these areas, one in five children do not go to school and around half of those who do attend school do not continue beyond primary level.
Children who are not going to school are easy targets for non-state armedgroups, and many of them are lured into the ranks of armed groups. Children born into poor families are also at greater risk of being involved in the conflict. The study shows that 57 percent of the children and youth recruited by armed groups, came from poor families which had been displaced multiple times by armed violence. About 80 percent of childrenand youth said they had received threats from an armed group to re-join and 10 percent said they might possibly return to an armed group.
Amid the intensification of the military offensive against the so-called Islamic State (IS) in the Iraqi city of Mosul and the resulting displacement of civilians, the UN said that it has received reports that Iraqi civilians are also fleeing into Syria, which itself is reeling from a five-year long conflictthat has displaced millions of Syrians and left hundreds of thousands trapped in besieged cities.
According to UNICEF, some 20,700 people have been displaced since the operation to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul started on 17 October this year, estimating that 9,700 of them are children in urgent need of assistance. Inside Mosul, nearly 300,000 children and their families lost access to one of the three major water conduits in the eastern part of the city. IS currently controls part of the city, where the broken pipeline is located, making it very hard to access and repair quickly.
“Children and their families are facing a horrific situation in Mosul. Not only are they in danger of getting killed or injured in the cross-fire, now potentially more than half a million people do not have safe water to drink,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF Representative in Iraq.
Recently released figures from Switzerland show a dramatic increase in the use of unscientific techniques to establish the age of unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the country. Out of an estimated 2,700 unaccompanied children who applied for asylum in the country last year, 1,034 had their wrists x-rayed to estimate their “bone age” - a procedure which has a margin of error of more than two years. This practice is based on the Greulich and Pyle Atlas, which documented the growth of white children in the United States in the 1930s, measures which are not transferrable to refugees arriving in modern day Switzerland. The registration centre in Zurich is also reported to have conducted genital exams to determine the age of young arrivals. Denise Graf, lawyer and asylum coordinator of Amnesty International was highly critical of the practice, arguing that such sensitive exams cannot be performed on children who may have suffered trauma, and least of all “without any medical purpose”.
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Closing
The UN has completed an internal investigation into allegations of sexual abuse against Burundian and Gabonese peacekeepers deployed in Dekoa, Kemo prefecture, Central African Republic (CAR).
The UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) interviewed 139 people and then investigated their accounts. A total of 16 possible perpetrators from Gabon and 25 from Burundi have been identified through photos and corroborating evidence. Of the 139 victims, 25 were children who asserted that they had been sexually assaulted. Eight paternity claims have been filed, six of which were by children.
The UN has shared the report with the Governments of Burundi and Gabon, which includes the names of the identified alleged perpetrators and has requested that appropriate judicial action proceed in order to ensure criminal accountability.
Recent revelations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in CAR have raised serious questions around the UN's transparency in dealing with such cases. We are calling for transparency, accountability and redress for the victims.
Read more on how the UN mishandled recent cases of sexual abuse of children, what role different agencies had in the process, how you can support this campaign, and a timeline of events.
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