RIGHTS: Children of War Need More Support

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Feb 24 2005 (IPS) - Iman was only 14 when a Liberian warlord took her as his ‘spouse’. For months she was forced to serve as his sexual slave.

She was among the fortunate few who escaped that fate. Today she works on a farm near her hometown in a rehabilitation programme launched by the French group Medicins du Monde (Doctors of the World).

Iman, like hundreds of other children at this centre in Liberia, is discovering a normal and busy life. “Children who survived the civil war are now given tasks like looking after animals or plantations, besides being given education,” says psychiatrist Frederique Drogoul who spent several months in Liberia last year.

But the number of children finding rehabilitation is not enough, she says. United Nations figures show that about 300,000 children are enrolled in military conflicts around the world. “But the teenagers enrolled directly in regular or irregular armies represent only a thin fraction of the total number abused by wars,” Drogoul told IPS. That number goes into the millions, she said.

Drogoul, who is now monitoring treatment of Chechen children traumatised by war, says treatment is difficult but can be successful. Chechen children being treated in the neighbouring Ingoushia republic are provided schooling, entertainment and psychiatric treatment.

“All children in Ingouisha attend school, are led to play games and are given toys,” Drogoul said. “But one child in five shows deep disturbing symptoms such as insomnia, incontinence and rejection of learning. That suggests the need for deep psychiatric treatment.”

The children are treated by Chechen psychiatrists trained and monitored by European experts. “Children must be treated by their own nationals, by people who speak their language, know their culture and are able to establish easy contact with them,” Drogoul said.

One method used is to encourage children to draw, she said. The drawings can become a mediation tool between the psychiatrist and the subconscious of the child. “After a couple of months we are able to lead the child into a therapeutic reflection of the sufferings expressed through the drawings.”

The aim is not to induce a child to forget the trauma, but to help him or her understand the circumstances around it, she said.

A report by UN special representative on children and armed conflicts released earlier this month identified 54 military groups that count children and adolescents as combatants.

Many of these are in Africa – in Burundi, the Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda. But there are large numbers also in Afghanistan, Chechnya in Russia, Burma, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and in Colombia in Latin America.

The United Nations approved an “optional protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflicts” in May 2000. That calls for a ban on enrolling children below 18 as combatants.

The Rome statute of the International Criminal Court declares “the conscription or enlisting of children under the age of 15 years or using them to participate actively in hostilities in both international and non-international armed conflicts” a war crime.

But such conventions “are not worth the paper on which they are printed if none of them are applied,” Drogoul said.

Several activists and doctors who gathered at a convention on ‘Children and War’ in Paris earlier this month said that if international law were applied, large numbers of warlords using children should now be on trial.

“If the international laws were applied, every leader of the 54 groups the United Nations recently identified as abusing children either as cannon fodder or as sexual slaves should end up before the International Court of Justice,” Jacques Hintzy from the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said.

A first step should be to check trade in light arms, he said. “There is a strong correlation between the presence of light weapons in a conflict and the enrolment of children as combatants,” Hintzy told IPS.

Drogoul has called for more financial resources for Unicef and for non-governmental organisations working in areas of military conflict to support children to come out of war trauma.