CONFLICT: U.N. Seeks Security Council Action on Child Soldiers

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UNITED NATIONS, Jun 29 1998 (IPS) - A senior United Nations official is urging the Security Council to publicly censure those who target, use and abuse children in military conflicts worldwide.

Olara Otunnu, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, says the U.N.’s most powerful political body should act now to prevent the recruitment and brutalisation of child soldiers.

“A message needs to go out that it cannot be ‘business-as- usual’ when you systematically commit atrocities and abuses against children,” Otunnu told the Security Council Monday. However, he stopped short of proposing sanctions against offenders.

The United Nations says that an estimated 500,000 children under the age of 18 are under arms, serving as combatants in various theatres of conflict around the world. These include Sudan, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Sri Lanka, and Afghanistan.

Otunnu, a former Ugandan foreign minister, implicitly accused some member states of violating commitments they made to protect the rights and welfare of children.

The U.N. official specifically referred to the 1940 Geneva Convention, the Additional Protocols of 1977 and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child – all of which have been signed or ratified by an overwhelming majority of the 185 member states in the world body.

Together, he said, these instruments contain a number of provisions designed to ensure the rights, protection and welfare of children in international and internal armed conflicts.

The value of those provisions is limited to the extent to which they are applied, Otunnu argued. The gap between stated norms and actual practice, already unacceptably wide, is growing, he added.

“Words on paper cannot save children in peril,” Otunnu noted, adding that the international community must demonstrate readiness to use its collective influence to ensure that norms protecting children are observed.

Security Council members, aware of the growing involvement of children in civil wars worldwide, dedicated Monday’s special meeting to the issue.

In a statement that avoided specific references to any countries, Council president Ambassador Antonio Monteiro of Portugal expressed “grave concern” at the harmful impact of armed conflict on children.

The Council, he said, “strongly condemns” the targeting of children in armed conflict, including “their humiliation, sexual abuse, abduction and forced displacement.”

For the first time, the body condemned recruitment of children in hostilities as a violation of international law and called upon “all parties concerned to put an end to such activities.”

The Council also expressed its “readiness” to consider “appropriate responses” whenever schools, playgrounds or hospitals are specifically targeted during conflicts. It also said it would support efforts aimed at obtaining commitments not to involve children in armed conflict.

In the past decade alone, more than two million children have been killed and a million orphaned in military conflicts, Otunnu told Council members. Another 12 million children have been made homeless and 10 million have suffered serious psychological trauma, he added.

At present, half of the world’s total population of refugees and internally-displaced people are children. An estimated 800 children are killed or maimed by landmines every month, Otunnu said.

Ambassador Bill Richardson of the United States said Washington strenuously condemns the use of children in armed conflict and actively supports international efforts to curb the practice.

“It is time to exert pressure to implement the many norms that already exist to prevent further abuse and brutalisation of children,” the U.S. envoy said.

Speaking on behalf of the 15-member European Union, Ambassador John Weston of Britain said the EU was working actively for the establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC), regarded as a necessary means of holding to account the perpetrators of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

The U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has proposed that the ICC should act against recruitment regardless of whether children are used as front-line combatants or in support roles, such as messengers, drivers, cooks or in any other capacity.