CRINmail 209:
In this issue:
As the nature of conflict evolves and its aims, participants and rules become less defined, children's rights are violated in ever more sinister ways. Schools are under attack and children are increasingly being used as instruments of war - for instance as suicide bombers - paving the way for perpetrators of violations of human rights to escape with impunity.
Information is a powerful - and necessary - tool for conveying the horrors of warfare, understanding the impact of conflict on different population groups, gathering evidence on possible rights violations and eventually securing accountability. Yet, many ongoing conflicts and issues around the impact of war on children fall off the news radar. According to the 1996 UN report on the ‘Impact of Armed Conflict on Children’, prepared by Graça Machel, “whether a story is reported or not may depend less on its intrinsic importance than on subjective perceptions of the public’s appetite for information and at the expense of informing them.”
We can no longer stand on the sidelines. The CRIN team decided that each month, this CRINmail will attempt to draw attention to a conflict or issue affecting children that have slipped out of our consciousness or never made it there in the first place.
Around 10,000 people have been killed since the beginning of the conflictin Ukraine with civilian deaths on the rise this year since the fighting intensified in January between government and non-government forces near densely populated areas in the eastern parts of the country.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine erupted in March 2014 and a ceasefire was eventually negotiated in Minsk, Belarus, in February 2015 but there have been frequent violations. The latest round of intense fighting started late January and the truce announced in Munich last Saturday remains fragile.
At least five schools and two kindergartens have been damaged by heavy shelling and 11 other schools have had to close, according to humanitarian organisations. More than 2,600 children from 13 schools in government-controlled areas in eastern Ukraine have been affected by the sharp escalation in fighting, along with hundreds more from schools in non-government controlled areas. According to Save the Children, “There are reports of large numbers of unexploded ordnance in the streets, putting children at enormous risk when going to school, even when they can reopen.”
The heavy fighting also left more than 2,500 children in the Donetsk region of Ukraine without heat, electricity or water.
The UN estimates that “There are probably between 800,000 and one million IDPs (internally displaced persons) in government controlled areas of Ukraine”. According to International Crisis Group, any further escalation of fighting would have unpredictable political repercussions throughout Europe. Ukrainian families have borne the brunt of displacement of 3.8 million people within the country, but their capacity is overstretched. Those displaced internally today could well become the next wave of refugees pushed into Central and Western Europe.
While the UN Security Council has voiced its concern in a press statement about the situation in the country's eastern region and its severe impact on the local civilian population, International Crisis Group highlights the immediate need for all international actors to prevent the present escalation in eastern Ukraine from getting out of hand and to address the growing humanitarian needs of the affected population.
The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien reported to the Council that, government-imposed bureaucratic impediments, particularly in relation to the ban on commercial trade and importation of food and medicines across the ‘contact line,’ remained a serious constraint to alleviating the humanitarian crisis and that suspension of social payments by the government have severely affected hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
Before the conflict had intensified, a Ukrainian official had said that the conflict is affecting some 950,000 children. It has endangered the lives of some 100,000 children living near the frontline of fighting and forced about 250,000 others to flee their homes. Some 600,000 children were still residing in the conflict-torn territories, which are controlled by non-government forces. According to government’s estimates, at least 68 Ukrainian children were killed in the crossfire between government troops and rebels, while 186 others were wounded between April 2014 and January 2017.
Attacks in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the so-called Islamic State (IS) and pro-government troops killed or injured more children in 2016 than at any other time since the United Nations began keeping records. According to a new UN report, some 11,418 civilian casualties were confirmed last year – including 2,589 children – an increase of 24 per cent since the previous high in 2015.
UN investigators found that anti-government forces, mainly the Taliban, were responsible for almost two-thirds of the casualties, while pro-government forces were responsible for almost one-quarter. In addition, casualties caused by airstrikes carried out by Afghan and international forces have nearly doubled since 2015.
“Children have been killed, blinded, crippled – or inadvertently caused the death of their friends – while playing with unexploded ordnance that is negligently left behind by parties to the conflict,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) notes that Afghanistan remains one of the most dangerous, and most violent, crisis-ridden countries in the world. In 2016, the conflict led to unprecedented levels of displacement, reaching half a million in November – the highest number recorded to date. On average, every day sees another 1,500 people forced to leave their homes, escaping violence.
Syrian government forces conducted coordinated chemical attacks in opposition-controlled parts of Aleppo during the final month of the battle for the city, according to Human Rights Watch. The organisation documented government helicopters dropping chlorine in residential areas on at least eight occasions between 17 November and 13 December, 2016. The attacks, some of which included multiple munitions, killed at least nine civilians, including four children, and injured around 200.
The UN Security Council has yet to take action since a UN-appointed investigation, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism, identified military units responsible for earlier attacks using chlorine in Syria. Syrian government helicopters have dropped chlorine on opposition-controlled territory at least since April 2014. Chlorine has many civilian uses, but the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in October 2013, bans the use of the toxic properties of any chemical as a weapon.
Also on Syria, last month, UNICEF called for unimpeded and unconditional access to children in the besieged city of Deir ez-Zor, noting that they have not received regular humanitarian aid for more than two years. The escalation of violence threatens the lives of 93,000 civilians, including over 40,000 children who have been cut off from regular humanitarian aid for over two years.
“UNICEF calls on all parties to the conflict in Syria to immediately lift all sieges and allow unimpeded and unconditional access to children in Deir ez-Zor and in all the 15 areas under siege across the country,” said Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF's Regional Director, in a statement.
A new UN report on the impact of armed conflict on children in Somalia describes how grave violations against boys and girls were committed with impunity over the course of several years - from April 2010 to July 2016, with at least 3,400 children children killed.
The UN documented over 6,000 cases of child recruitment, with 70 percent committed by Al-Shabaab. Children were abducted by the group, recruited in their ranks, and were trained and used in combat. Some were as young as nine years old and reportedly taught to use weapons and sent to the frontline. The UN also verified the detention of at least 931 childrenbetween 2014 and July 2016. Detention was also used as a tactic to run intelligence operations and counterterrorism activities with children used as spies.
Two Action Plans were signed in 2012 by the government to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children in conflict, as well as the killing and maiming of children by the Somali National Army.
According to the UN, from the beginning of the hostilities in Yemen in March 2015 to 31 December 2016, at least 7,469 Yemenis were killed and 40,483 injured due to the conflict. The casualty figures include more than 1,400 children killed and over 2,140 children injured. Another 1,441 children have been recruited by armed forces and armed groups, some as young as eight years old.
Earlier in February, airstrikes killed six women and a girl gathering for a funeral in a private residence in Sana’a. In a statement following the incident, UN Special Envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, stressed that every day, across Yemen, civilians are killed by indiscriminate attacks by all parties to the conflict on residential areas in complete disregard of the rules of international humanitarian law.
Also in Yemen, IRIN reports that the shattered war economy is encouraging child marriage. While concrete evidence is hard to come by child marriage appears to be on the rise: a consequence of the extreme poverty caused by nearly two years of devastating war in what was already one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world.
Parents are increasingly unable to provide for their families, and interviews conducted by IRIN suggest some are opting to marry their daughters off younger than planned, reversing previous progress towards ending the practice.
Armed groups in Iraq affiliated to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party have recruited boys and girls. In two cases the armed groups abducted or seriously abused children who tried to leave their forces, according to Human Rights Watch.
Children interviewed said they have participated in fighting, while others said they had staffed checkpoints or cleaned and prepared weapons. Some 29 cases were documented in northern Iraq in which Kurdish and Yezidi children were recruited by two armed groups, the People’s Defense Forces (Hêzên Parastina Gel, or HPG) and the Shingal Resistance Units (Yekîneyên Berxwedana Şingal, or YBŞ), both affiliated with the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK). Even if the armed groups do not send childreninto combat, they place them at risk by training them in areas that Turkey has attacked with airstrikes in its conflict with the PKK, such as Iraq’s Qandil mountain area.
Burmese government forces committed rape and other sexual violence against ethnic Rohingya women and girls as young as 13 during security operations in northern Rakhine State in late 2016, according to investigations led by Human Rights Watch.
After attacks by Rohingya militants on border police posts on October 9, 2016, the Burmese military undertook a series of “clearance operations” in northern Rakhine State. Security forces summarily executed men, women, and children; looted property; and burned down at least 1,500 homes and other buildings. More than 69,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, while another 23,000 have become internally displaced.
Several women described how soldiers surrounded their villages or homes, then gathered the villagers in an outdoor area, separating men from women, and detained them for hours. Soldiers often shot villagers, and raped and gang raped women and girls. The sexual violence did not appear to be random or opportunistic, but part of a coordinated and systematic attack against Rohingya. Many women told Human Rights Watch that soldiers threatened or insulted them with language focused on their status as Rohingya Muslims.
Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar told IRIN that she would urge UN Member States to launch a Commission of Inquiry into military abuses of Myanmar’s minority Rohingya Muslims. Rights groups have, over the past few years, been urging the UN to investigate reports of abuses against the Rohingya.
Children and women are being raped by traffickers inside a refugee camp in northern France, according to detailed testimony gathered ahead of fresh legal action against the UK government’s approach to the welfare of unaccompanied minors.
Corroborating accounts from volunteers, medics, refugees and other officials reveal that sexual abuse is common within the large camp at Dunkirk and that children and women are forced to have sex by traffickers in return for blankets, food or the offer of passage to the UK.
Accounts from those at the camp, which currently holds up to 2,000 refugees, of whom an estimated 100 are unaccompanied minors, portray a squalid site with inadequate security and atrocious living conditions.
One volunteer coordinator, who started working at the camp last year, said: “Sexual assault, violence and rape are all far too common. Minors are assaulted and women are raped and forced to pay for smuggling with their bodies.” Testifying on condition of anonymity, she added: “Although the showers are meant to be locked at night, particularly dangerous individuals in the camp have keys and are able to take the women to the showers in the night to force themselves on them. This has happened to women I know very well.”
Legal proceedings will be issued by London-based Bindmans against the Home Office, which is accused of acting unfairly and irrationally by electing to settle only minors from the vast Calais camp that closed last October, ignoring the child refugees gathered in Dunkirk, 40 miles away along the coast.
With already more than 3.5 million displaced persons within and outside the borders of South Sudan and thousands more driven to neighbouring countries every day, the UN refugee agency has appealed for an urgent peaceful resolution to what has now become Africa's worst refugee crisis.
“Recent new arrivals report suffering inside South Sudan with intense fighting, kidnappings, rape, fears of armed groups and threats to life, as well as acute food shortage,” according to William Spindler, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “More than 60 percent of the refugees are children, many arriving with alarming levels of malnutrition – enduring devastating impact of the brutalities of the ongoing conflict,” he added.
The period between September and December 2016 saw almost half a million South Sudanese people seeking refuge in neighbouring countries. The majority of the refugees are being hosted by Uganda, followed by Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
South Sudan has faced ongoing challenges since a political face-off between President Salva Kiir and his then former Vice-President Riek Machar erupted into full blown conflict between forces loyal to each in December 2013. The crisis has produced one of the world's worst displacement situations with immense suffering for civilians. Despite the August 2015 peace agreement that formally ended the war, conflict and instability have also spread to previously unaffected areas.
This week, famine has been formally declared in Unity State in the northern-central part of the country. According to the UN, the war and a collapsing economy have left some 100,000 people facing starvation and a further one million people on the brink of famine.
An estimated 23,700 refugee and migrant children remain stranded in Greece and the Balkans, including infants and newborns mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – according to UNICEF. Many are being housed in shelters that are ill-equipped for winter, even as temperatures fall below freezing. Some parts of Greece, especially the islands sheltering thousands of refugees in flimsy tents, have experienced heavy snowfall for the first time in years. UNICEF continues to call for refugees and migrants currently living in overcrowded and under-serviced camps on the islands to be moved to more appropriate and safe accommodations on the mainland.
UNICEF also underlined the need to ensure that children are protected and that migrants should not be pushed back to places where their safety is at risk. Emphasizing the need to prevent exploitation and trafficking of children, UNICEF called on the European Union and its member States to “adhere fully to the principle of non-refoulement as sending children back into harm’s way or returning boats to Libya without a proper plan to protect them, would only add to their hardship.” It also called for States to commit resources to strengthen child protection programmes in Libya and for investment in reception and care centres in the country. It added that there was a need for more support to credible resettlement and family reunification programmes so that desperate refugees and migrants do not have to risk their lives by turning to smugglers.
According to the UN agency, a record number of refugee and migrant deaths in the Mediterranean have been reported over the past three months, including an estimated 190 children.
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Closing
The best way to protect children from armed conflict is to prevent armed conflict in the first place, Graca Machel wrote in the 1996 UN report on the ‘Impact of Armed Conflict on Children’.
Top officials from the UN and the international community commemorated two decades of efforts to protect children from the scourge of war by marking the 20th anniversary of General Assembly resolution 51/77 (1997) on promotion and protection of the rights of children. As an outcome of the resolution, the General Assembly requested the Secretary-General to name a Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict. The Office of the Special Representative works to eliminate six grave violations: recruitment and use of children, killing and maiming of children, sexual violence against children, attacks on school and hospitals, abduction of children, and denial of humanitarian access.
In an informal meeting of the 193-member Assembly in New York, the UN body’s President, Peter Thomson, called the resolution “a landmark development in our global efforts to improve the protection of children in conflict situations. [...] Among the incomprehensible horrors that take place in the chaos of warzones, unconscionable crimes, violations, exploitation and abuse are perpetrated against the most vulnerable members of our societies – namely our children,” Mr. Thomson said.
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