Children are targets in dozens of conflicts worldwide, but the experiences of Colombia’s children were praised here by rights activists and UN officials who want to limit children’s exposure to armed conflict as offering some hope for the future.

Carol Bellamy, executive director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told the plenary session of the Hague Appeal for Peace that the Children’s Movement for Peace in Colombia “provides perhaps the clearest proof to date of the power of children’s voices to bring about positive social change”.

The Hague Appeal for Peace -May 11-15 – brought together foreign ministers as well as thousands of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and Nobel laureates to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Russian Czar Nicholas’s conference for peace at The Hague.

Bellamy praised the 2.7 million Colombian children who voted in a UNICEF-supported special election three years ago to choose which rights they believed were most important – an election in which the children participating overwhelming voted in favour of the right to survival and the right to peace.

“Thanks to the Children’s Movement, Colombian adolescents who were previously faced with just two grim choices – to accept their vulnerability to violence as inevitable, or to engage in violence themselves – have found a third: the option of choosing peace,” Bellamy argued.

The children themselves have argued that their November 1996 special ballot set the stage for the vote by adults one year later to favour a ‘Mandato Ciudadano’ (Citizen’s Mandate) asking Colombia’s government and armed factions to cease attacks on civilians, kidnappings, torture, massacres and population displacement.

“Our example of mobilisation in 1996 unchained the current peace process that is being developed in Colombia,” said Farliz Calle Guerrero, a member of the Children’s Movement.

He argued that the Colombia experience shows that “the nations of the world have in their hands a great tool: the opportunity of allowing children to participae actively in all matters that especially affect us.”

One of the accomplishments of the Children’s Movement has been to set up rules governing several “zones of peace” where children are not to be targeted.

The rules – an expansion of UNICEF efforts over the year to open up peaceful corridors within conflict areas, and then ultimately to propose the concept of “children as zones of peace” – prohibit combat near schools, humanitarian services or other public areas where children are present.

The children have also enforced their own rules to avoid any fighting within the zones of peace. Wilfredo Zambrano, a Children’s Movement member from the major combat zone of Uraba, said that children can be expelled from the peace zones for resolving their conflicts by force, because such fighting could break their commitment to peace.

The Children’s Movement, which has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, captured the attention of delegates at this week’s Hague Appeal as a step forward.

Similarly, other groups of children brought artistic performances to The Hague – from the Sarajevo Drum Orchestra’s music therapy to South Africa’s Victory Sonqoba Community Theatre’s songs and dramatic presentations – to present pacifist messages.

Yet for all the examples of children’s activism, officials at The Hague warned that children are increasingly being victimised in intra- state conflicts. Currently, some 300,000 children under the age of 18 are being compelled to fight as child soldiers, said Olara Otunnu, UN special envoy for children and armed conflict.

Despite efforts by the United Nations to raise the minimum age of military recruitment worldwide to 18, several nations – including the United States and Britain – continue to recruit and train children below that age.

In recent conflicts, Otunnu added, some 90 percent of all victims are civilian women and children. More than two million children have been killed in conflicts over the past decade, six million injured or disabled and some 10 million psychologically traumatised, he added.

“This is the world turned upside down,” he argued, adding that cultural taboos that prohibited the harming of children in wartime have been weakened and need to be reinforced.

Some experts believe that economic sanctions have come to threaten children as much as actual warfare, with opposition growing in particular to the nearly nine-year UN embargo against Iraq.

UNICEF estimates that the sanctions are causing the deaths of some 5,000 Iraqi children every month from hunger and disease, and have left one-quarter of all Iraqi infants malnourished.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Nobel laureate from Northern Ireland, told IPS that she was horrified when she saw the dramatic impact of the UN sanctions on Iraq during a visit there last March with a delegation by the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

If people knew the impact of the sanctions on children, she argued, “they would feel that this suffering has got to stop”.

Yet Maguire said that she has been unable to convince politicians from the United States and Britain to visit Iraq and see how sanctions have affected the country’s children. Meanwhile, she warned, “Iraq is slowly dying”.