21 August 2009 - CRIN Children and Armed Conflict 133
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SECURITY COUNCIL: UN to name those that kill children in war [news]
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously this month to name and shame countries and insurgents groups engaged in conflicts that lead to children being killed, maimed and raped.
The council resolution will expand a U.N. list that in March identified more than 60 governments and armed groups that recruit child soldiers.
It reaffirms the council's intention "to take action" — including possible sanctions — against governments and insurgent groups that continue violating international law on the rights and protection of children in armed conflicts.
"This is a new, significant step for the protection of children by the United Nations," said Mexico's U.N. Ambassador Claude Heller, who sponsored the measure. "With this resolution, the Security Council sends a very clear political signal ... (that) the security and well-being of children must be respected with no exception whatsoever."
"Notwithstanding, we must also recognise that there is still much to be done if we want children to never again fall victim to the spiral of violence that armed conflicts generate," he said.
A resolution adopted by the council in 2005 took the first major step to prevent the victimisation of young people in war zones by addressing the exploitation of children as combatants. According to the U.N., there are still some 250,000 child soldiers.
It endorsed the public naming of all governments and insurgent groups that recruit or use children as fighters and called on those parties to prepare and implement "time-bound action plans" to halt the use of youngsters in their militaries. It also established U.N.-led task forces to monitor and report on violations against children.
The new resolution condemns the continuing recruitment and use of children in armed conflict and all other violations against them — and it reaffirms that it will keep up the list of governments and armed groups using child soldiers.
It asks Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to add to the list "those parties to armed conflict that engage, in contravention of applicable international law, in patterns of killing and maiming of children and/or rape and other sexual violence against children." It also calls on the parties listed to prepare action plans to halt the abuses.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, called the new resolution "historic," saying the expansion of "the list of shame" will have consequences.
She said who gets on the list will depend on the criteria, which are being discussed with lawyers and should be presented to the U.N. in about six months.
[Source: Associated Press]
Further information
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=20628&flag=news
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ARMED CONFLICT: Engaging non-state armed groups through human rights education: Reflections and lessons learned [publication]
This report discusses the experiences, reflections and lessons learned by civil society organisations who are engaging non-state armed groups in Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines through human rights education. It defines human rights education as a continuous process of transformation that involves the sharing of knowledge and skills, training and education that promotes the institutionalisation of rights within the organisational structures, policies, and practices of non-state armed group.
The report proposes the conduct of human rights education as a viable measure to promote and ensure respect of child rights standards among NSAGS, and serve as a catalyst towards changes in policies and practices of non-state armed groups. The report contains guidelines and tools that can help civil society groups develop, implement and evaluate human rights education programs involving non-state armed groups.
Further information:
For more information, contact:
Southeast Asia Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
Unit 1501, Future Point Plaza 1, 112 Panay Avenue, Quezon City, Philippines
Tel : +632-376-6388
E-mail : [email protected]
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=20659
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COLOMBIA: Armed recruitment of children forces indigenous off their land [news]
[MITU, 12 August 2009] - In a distant corner of Colombia on the border with Brazil, the department of Vaupes is home to 27 different indigenous groups, each with a different culture and language. But confronted by conflict and forced displacement, many are at risk of not surviving.
The Vaupes region is remote, extending over more than 50,000 square kilometers of jungle and rivers. There are just 16 kilometres of paved road circling the small city of Mitu, which is linked to the country's capital, Bogotá, by just two flights a week. The Rio Vaupes provides the only other means of transportation to the outside world.
The region is also a stronghold of one of the country's largest irregular armed groups, which controls the rural areas while the national armed forces seek to reassert themselves beyond the city. Many communities along the river live in forced isolation and virtual confinement. The security situation often leaves individuals with no alternative but to flee.
"In the past two years, the leading cause of forced displacement has been the recruitment of indigenous children by illegal armed groups," a local state employee in Mitu told UNHCR. In 2008, some 500 families fled their homes, most because their children were about to be taken into illegal groups.
Children as young as 13 have been recruited, and both boys and girls are at risk. The regional indigenous council, known as CRIVA in Spanish, is particularly concerned about recruitment among indigenous groups at risk of extinction. One of the most urgent cases is that of the Pizamira. With a population of less than 50, three children were recruited last year.
"Many of the parents have gone into the forest to look for their children, but they couldn't get them back," one council member told UNHCR.
Some 42 indigenous minors have been taken into illegal groups since the start of 2008, according to CRIVA. Eleven of them were students at a boarding school in Bocas de Yi, an indigenous community on a bend of the Rio Vaupes that houses children from all over the river to give them a chance to study.
Residents of Bocas de Yi live in complete isolation, with no access to basic services. Some 200 local people share what few resources exist with 160 children studying at the school. The boarding school has no water, electricity or toilets. Some children sleep in hammocks, others on the floor.
"Most of the children stay here all year-long because going home is too far or too dangerous. The conditions here are very, very hard, year after year," according to a teacher. "These children have no real hope and it makes them terribly vulnerable to other options some unscrupulous people may offer them," he said.
Not all forced recruitment is conducted violently. One of the most common methods is to make young people "fall in love", as the locals say, with indoctrination and promises of a better life. Under humanitarian law any recruitment of minors into illegal armed groups is defined as forced recruitment, whether or not the child believes he wants to join.
Rather than take the risk of losing their children, many families prefer to flee. About 3,000 people, or 1o per cent of the population of Vaupes, have fled their homes.
UNHCR is also working with the military in Vaupes as part of a national training initiative to improve knowledge of the rights of the displaced.
"In Colombia, military personnel are often the first or only state presence in communities at risk," said Roberto Mignone, UNHCR's Deputy Representative in Colombia. "The armed forces have a very significant role to play both in protection and prevention of forced displacement,"
Because of their strong cultural, social and economic links to the land, forced displacement is especially hard for indigenous people, and can lead to the disappearance of entire groups. According to Colombia's Constitutional Court, a third of the 90 different ethnic groups in the country are at risk.
Further information
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=20689&flag=news
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GAZA: Traumatised children struggle to rise again [news]
[BREJ, Gaza, 5 August 2009] - Tens of thousands of children in Gaza are still suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following Israel's three-week bombing December- January.
Several crisis counselling teams run by international organisations and NGOs have been carrying out intervention programmes aimed at helping Gaza's most vulnerable put the pieces of their lives back together.
But these groups warn that while there has been some improvement in the collective psyche of Gaza's children, the long-term effects of war are now beginning to show, and unless the rights of Gazans are respected, the next generation's future will be hard to predict.
"What is needed is sustained advocacy at a political level to ensure practical changes can be implemented," says Marixie Mercado from UNICEF.
Well over half of Gaza's 1.5 million people are under 18 years of age.
More than 70 per cent of children in Gaza are likely to present with PTSD, and 34 percent have anxiety symptoms of likely clinical significance, according to a report from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP). A further 43 percent are considered by their parents to have significant mental health morbidity.
Ahmed Abu Jabara, 15, was forced to help drag the bodies of his father, his two siblings and his badly injured mother from underneath the rubble of their home during the war.
"Our home was hit by seven missiles fired by an Israeli drone on January 5 at about five in the morning," said Jabara, who lives in the Brej refugee camp just south of Gaza city.
"I was fast asleep. When the thunderous explosions first woke me I thought it was the neighbours who had been bombed. After a little while I realised that it was our home," Jabara told IPS.
Ahmed's father and his brothers Osama, 21, and Basil, 29, were killed, while his mother lay under the rubble with serious leg injuries.
But Jabara was one of the luckier children. He was among a group of 73 children flown to Poland as part of a three-week recreational and psychological support tour in June. The children, accompanied by mental health professionals, were taken there by the GCMHP, with the support of Polish President Lech Kaczynski.
"There was a remarkable improvement in the behaviour of the children while they were in Poland," Raghda Al-Jadeely from the GCMHP told IPS. "They became more relaxed and cheerful. But when they arrived back, the sense of despair and tension was there again."
"I still have nightmares where I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, and thinking we are being bombed again," says Jabara. "But when we were in Poland I experienced no fear, and I saw another kind of life."
UNICEF has counselled over 11,000 children and 5,500 primary caregivers in an individual and group capacity. Together with 30 partner organisations the number of children reached is far higher. "Children's fears since the war have diminished," Mercado told IPS. "They are clinging less to their parents, and there are fewer cases of bed-wetting. But at the same time the long-term effects of war such as chronic depression, a sense of hopelessness, a lack of joy, and worry for the future have set in."
Eyad Abu Hejair from the Palestinian Centre for Democracy and Conflict Resolution (PCDCR), one of UNICEF's partners, speaks of three strategies in the counselling programmes his organisation runs.
"We tell the children not to deny or forget their experiences, and to understand the context in which they happened," Abu Hejair told IPS. "Secondly, we encourage them to talk openly about what they saw and heard; and finally we teach them coping mechanisms while explaining to them that they have the power to recover and that life isn't over."
In one of the projects children played at reading out a news bulletin from a radio station. They told the world what was happening to them, their feelings, and asked for international help.
A group of German psychologists have helped arrange a number of activities for children at Gaza's Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children. "The children were involved in dance, music, entertainment, comedy workshops and other forms of creative expression," says director Muhammad Al-Sharif.
"The kids were laughing and having fun as they were able to forget their problems and enjoy the innocence of childhood for a few brief hours each afternoon. The Germans commented that being deaf had ironically protected the children from being exposed to the full trauma of the war, as they were able to interact more quickly than hearing children," Al-Sharif told IPS.
Mercado says education is vital for the rehabilitation of children. "Last week a Unicef team surveyed the schools damaged and destroyed during the war. There has been no progress in rebuilding them as Israel is preventing most building material for reconstruction from entering Gaza.
"Even if the schools are rebuilt and massive aid pours in, without political will on an international level to improve the dire situation in the Gaza Strip the children will remain at risk."
Jabara does now dream of a future. "I want to finish school and go to university to study to be a doctor, so I can help other people who are wounded and sick."
[Source: IPS]
Further information
Visit: http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=20640&flag=news
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