The al-Shaymeh Education Complex for Girls after it was struck by missiles fired by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, Hodeidah, 9 November 2015. Credit: Amnesty International

By Matthew Wells
WASHINGTON DC, Jun 22 2021 (IPS)

Frontline workers who document and respond to violations against children have faced a particularly challenging last year, from the impact of Covid-19 on operations and child protection to the record levels of displacement worldwide to the ever-worsening threats from militaries and non-state armed groups.

Beyond the public eye, there’s another challenge that devastates morale and undermines the protection of children in armed conflict: the politicization of a key UN process for holding accountable those responsible for grave violations.

In 2005, the UN Security Council established a Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism (MRM) to document grave violations against children in situations of armed conflict. It was a landmark achievement.

The documentation feeds into an annual report from the UN Secretary-General with an annexed list of perpetrators; it is meant to form the backbone of UN-led accountability efforts for militaries and armed groups alike, and to help prevent further violations against children.

The Security Council will discuss this year’s report on 28 June.

The report comes as conflict’s devastating impact on children – and the repercussions of inaction – has yet again been made apparent. At least 65 children were killed and a further 540 injured during the Israeli military’s bombardments in Gaza in May, according to UNICEF.

The Israeli military has never been among the report’s listed parties, despite years in which its incidents of killing and maiming were among the highest verified.

Meanwhile in Myanmar, the security forces have killed at least 58 children since the 1 February coup, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners of Burma (AAPPB).

Last year, despite the MRM’s verification of more than 200 instances of the Myanmar military’s recruitment or use of children, the Secretary-General de-listed them for that violation, while continuing to list them for other violations, including killing and maiming.

This year saw the military re-listed for recruitment and use – the right result, as they never should have been removed in the first place, but more a reflection of the changed geopolitics post-coup than of a major surge in such abusive practices.

To be effective, the criteria for listing and de-listing perpetrators must be applied consistently. Instead, politics and power dynamics in the Security Council and Secretary-General’s office have at times replaced objectivity.

Earlier this year, a group of eminent experts published an independent review of listing decisions between 2010 and 2020. It found at least eight parties who were not listed despite verified responsibility for killing and maiming more than 100 children in a year.

Militaries are less likely to be listed than non-state armed groups even for similar numbers of verified violations, as the experts and civil society groups have noted, with discrepancies even in the same country situation. And de-listing decisions have flouted criteria established in 2010, which require a party to end such violations before removal from the list.

For example, in 2016, the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces were initially listed for grave violations against children during the war in Yemen but were quickly removed by then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He publicly called out Saudi Arabia and others for effectively blackmailing the UN by threatening to pull funding from UN programmes.

The coalition forces were then listed for grave violations from 2017 to 2019, before UN Secretary-General António Guterres again de-listed them in 2020. They remain off the list this year, despite the MRM verifying their responsibility for 194 incidents of killing or maiming children.

Two children walk home from school in the neighbourhood of Dara’iya, Raqqa. January 21, 2019. Credit: Andrea DiCenzo/Panos via Amnesty International

A former UNICEF staffer put it succinctly in an interview with Amnesty International: “No-one wants to be the [Secretary-General] who lost a massive amount of money.”

Amnesty International recently carried out interviews with over 110 experts, including frontline actors reporting into the MRM in eight different conflict-affected countries. Their experiences further reveal the politicization’s sobering impact, with implications for which incidents even make it into the Secretary-General’s report.

When individuals and organizations feel their reports are ignored or that militaries and armed groups remain unlisted despite ample documentation, it understandably reduces their continued willingness to report to the MRM. In Myanmar, for example, several people said they felt defeated when the military was de-listed last year and wondered what their difficult documentation efforts had been for.

In Iraq, a humanitarian worker, who resigned because of the politics around the process, said that survivors, witnesses, and those involved in the documentation would put themselves at risk to provide information, only to see a politicized outcome.

Such concerns, recurrent among those we interviewed, are particularly damning as they come from people working at great risk to respond to violations. The MRM has achieved much in 15 years – documenting conflicts’ impact on children and putting pressure on perpetrators – precisely because of these frontline workers’ efforts.

The growing pressure from influential leaders and states undermines their work and the credibility of accountability efforts meant to respond to and prevent grave violations against children.

Among the frontline workers we spoke with across eight conflict situations, roughly half were national staff and more than two-thirds were women. This raises further questions about the power dynamics behind ignoring the findings of their reports.

Secretary-General Guterres has just been given another five-year term; he must become bolder and more courageous in prioritizing human rights and calling out perpetrators, including on children and armed conflict.

Together with the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, he should commit publicly to applying the same standard irrespective of perpetrator or context – producing a complete list based on evidence and objective criteria, something he has failed to do again this year.

Next year, he must follow the criteria laid out in 2010; the Saudi Arabia-led coalition and Israeli military, among others, will again prove a key test.

For their part, UN member states must demand a credible list. Why have teams on the ground put themselves in danger to document violations that get ignored?

Frontline workers need confidence that their work is part of a credible accountability process. To fulfill its potential, the Secretary-General’s report must follow the evidence, not a politics of power that shields certain perpetrators from scrutiny. Anything else makes a mockery of the system and undermines the protection of children.

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

Excerpt:

A Rohingya woman at Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Naimul Haq / IPS

By Matthew Wells
COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Feb 9 2018 (IPS)

Abdu Salam stayed in his village as Myanmar soldiers and local vigilantes burned down dozens of homes there last August. He stayed as news spread of atrocities that soldiers had committed in other Rohingya villages across northern Rakhine State. He stayed because Hpon Nyo Leik village was his home, the only home he’d known, and he wanted to protect his family’s property and right to live there.

But when, at the end of 2017, the Myanmar military’s starvation tactics left Abdu Salam’s family struggling to find food, they were forced to join the exodus to Bangladesh.

On 13 February, the UN Security Council will be briefed again on the situation in Myanmar. The briefing comes as the Myanmar government says it’s ready to start repatriating people from Bangladesh. But the military’s efforts to drive the Rohingya population out of the country haven’t even ground to a halt. The Security Council’s inaction, amid a weak international response to the ongoing crimes against humanity, has been a key part of the problem.

The Security Council must finally act, and send a clear, united message to the Myanmar military that atrocities must stop, and there will be no more impunity for its crimes. To start, the Security Council should impose a comprehensive arms embargo, as well as targeted financial sanctions on senior officials implicated in serious rights violations. It should explore avenues to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes under international law. And it should call on Myanmar to dismantle the apartheid system that forms the backdrop of the current crisis.

Abdu Salam and I sat in his recently erected bamboo shelter at the edge of Kutupalong Extension, the ever-growing refugee camp in southern Bangladesh that houses most of the 688,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar since last August. He was with his wife and six children, including his baby son, visibly emaciated, who slept in a makeshift crib that hung from the shelter’s ceiling.

His family arrived in Bangladesh in early January, among the hundreds who still cross the border each week. As part of our latest research in Bangladesh, my Amnesty International colleagues and I interviewed 19 men and women from this newest wave of refugees. I heard the same story again and again: the Myanmar military squeezed them out of northern Rakhine State by driving them to the brink of starvation.

Abdu Salam told me he used to go to the hill near his village and collect wood to sell at market. But even before the current crisis began, that source of livelihood was cut off, due to the severe movement restrictions imposed on the Rohingya population, as part of the conditions of apartheid under which they have lived.

Then, following the 25 August attacks on around 30 security force outposts by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Myanmar military unleashed a campaign of violence against the Rohingya across northern Rakhine State. Our October 2017 report documented in detail the military’s crimes against humanity, including the widespread killing of Rohingya men, women and children; rape and other forms of sexual violence against women and girls; forced deportation; and the targeted burning of villages. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) estimates that at least 6,700 people were killed in the first month of the crisis. The UN, other rights organizations, and media outlets have all painted the same, devastating picture.

Hpon Nyo Leik village was spared the worst of the military’s violence. But security forces arrested Abdu Salam’s 14-year-old son, accusing him of involvement with ARSA. To secure the boy’s release, the family scraped together almost their entire savings. It’s one of many examples of arrest-for-extortion we have long documented.

In the months after 25 August, movement restrictions grew even tighter for the remaining Rohingya, and already strict curfews were extended. Soldiers and vigilantes looted and torched Rohingya markets or, as in Hpon Nyo Leik, restricted market access to people holding a National Verification Card (NVC), a temporary identification document that most of the Rohingya community rejects, since it fails to recognise them as citizens.

Even as pressure mounted and hundreds of thousands left, many other Rohingya families stayed. Agriculture is central to livelihoods across Rakhine State, and the harvest season for rice, the area’s staple crop, occurs in November and December. Stockpiles from the previous harvest began to run low. The Myanmar military must have known what was to follow when, in many Rohingya villages, it then blocked people from going to their paddy fields.

As the harvest started, Abdu Salam worked for several days. “Then the soldiers came and said, ‘This harvest is not your harvest’,” he told me. “There were many [of us] harvesting there. All of us were forced to leave.” Soon after, he saw non-Rohingya villagers using machinery to harvest the same crops.

With no food for their six children, except occasional handouts of a little rice from wealthier neighbours, Abdu Salam’s family fled in late December, joined by others facing the same situation. Even before the August attacks and subsequent lockdown, the World Food Programme warned that malnutrition rates in northern Rakhine State were at emergency levels.

As Rohingya families fled toward the coast in recent weeks, Myanmar forces dealt a final blow by systematically robbing them at checkpoints. More than a dozen recent arrivals, including Abdu Salam, described to me the worst such checkpoint, near Sein Hnyin Pyar village tract in Buthidaung Township. There, soldiers separate men from women; search sacks and bodies, often sexually assaulting women in the process; and steal whatever of value they find, including money, jewellery, clothes, and phones.

Though the tactics may have changed, it should come as no surprise that the military’s ruthless campaign races forward. In the midst of its almost incomprehensively-efficient ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population, some states around the world have expressed alarm or even condemned the atrocities. But the international community has taken almost no concrete action.

The Security Council must finally act, and send a clear, united message to the Myanmar military that atrocities must stop, and there will be no more impunity for its crimes. To start, the Security Council should impose a comprehensive arms embargo, as well as targeted financial sanctions on senior officials implicated in serious rights violations. It should explore avenues to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes under international law. And it should call on Myanmar to dismantle the apartheid system that forms the backdrop of the current crisis.

In addition, the Security Council must demand that Myanmar authorities provide full and sustained aid access throughout the country, as well as access to independent investigators, including the UN Fact-Finding Mission. It should also demand that Myanmar respect a free press and immediately release two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, being detained and prosecuted simply for carrying out their reporting work on the military’s atrocities.

The Security Council has to quickly decide which side of history it wants to be on. With each day it fails to act, more people like Abdu Salam are forced to flee.

Excerpt: