From the ashes of 4 decade of war, AIDS and corruptionin Uganda, Africa, The Bataka Squad artists, Babaluku and Saba Saba,rise to forge a revolutionary path using music. They are on a missionto empower the forgotten youth of Africa from within, while spreadingtheir message of hope around the globe. Narrated by Spearhead singerMichael Franti, follow the Bataka movement to amplify the spirit of thenext generation in this musical journey.
A child soldier is any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers and anyone accompanying such groups, other than family members. The definition includes girls recruited for sexual purposes and for forced marriage. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms.
From: Cape Town Principles and Best Practices on the Recruitment of Children into the Armed Forces and on Demobilization and Social Reintegration of Child Soldiers in Africa (Cape Town, 27-30 April 1997). See UNICEF Children and Armed Conflict for more information.
And here is the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children into armed conflict from UNICEF:
Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (2000) The protocol sets 18 as the minimum age for direct participation in hostilities, for recruitment into armed groups, and for compulsory recruitment by governments. States may accept volunteers from the age of 16 but must deposit a binding declaration at the time of ratification or accession, setting out their minimum voluntary recruitment age and outlining certain safeguards for such recruitment. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict
Let’s highlight this problem in a little more detail. Best practices reporting from organizations like the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has outlined much of the problem - mostly stemming from reliance on short-term solutions that limit the true needs of the former child soldiers. One year programs, funded by major relief organizations and the United Nations, on the plus side, can address the immediate needs of the children, first by rescuing them, and then providing immediate medical support and short-term counseling for pressing psychological issues such as PSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Most of these programs, unfortunately, are disassembled after one or two years, leaving the children without the long term support and skill-sets required to reenter society as a productive young adult. Instead, many of these children, with no other options and either no family or unsupportive family members, head back to the street and to violence.
Longer term programs are needed that provide educational resources, skill-set building, career and technical training and longer term counseling. Many problems exhibited by the children manifest themselves years after they are released or rescued, and they are often unable to cope without supportive structures.
…years of accumulated best practice on releasing children from fighting forces and assisting their rehabilitation and reintegration is being overlooked by those involved in designing and implementing disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) programs. Sustained funding for the long-term support of former child soldiers is also rarely available. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, delayed, unpredictable and short-term funding, combined with poor planning and mismanagement of the DDR program, meant that some 14,000 former child soldiers were excluded from reintegration support.
Also, many DDR programs are targeted towards boys who were fighting on the front line, not girl child soldiers or child soldiers serving in more support roles. Again, from the report:
…the overwhelming majority of girls soldiers are not identified by and do not register in official DDR programs. In Liberia, where the DDR program ended in late 2004, only just over a quarter of the 11,000 girls known to have been associated with fighting forces registered in the official DDR program.
A new film, “Johnny Mad Dog”, which won the Prize of Hope at Cannes film festival, was screened this past week at the United Nations - and sponsored by Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict. Also attending were Special Court for Sierra Leone prosecutor Steven Rapp, France’s UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, and advocate/rapper Emmanuel Jal.
two teens trying to survive civil war in an unnamed African country. In an interview with AFP, [director] Sauvaire conceded that his film was violent, but said that the gun-toting youngsters in the film, all war veterans, were not traumatized by the experience and rather found acting therapeutic.
Here’s a clip from YouTube.
And a review from Jonathan Romney of Screen Daily:
Cinema is forever inventing new ways to tell us that war is hell, but few recent films have explored the extremes of that hell as vividly or intrepidly as Jean-Stephane Sauvaire’s African drama Johnny Mad Dog. Shattering performances by unknowns, many of them actually former child soldiers, plus a confrontational directing style make this one of the most striking recent French fiction debuts.
Check out this 2005 interview on NPR with Emmanuel Dongala about his novel.
On Tuesday of this week, experts and advocates gathered at the United Nations to discuss the impact of the availability and proliferation of small arms on the continuing use of child soldiers throughout the world. United Nations envoy on children and armed conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy stated the following: (From the UN News Center).
It is argued by many that it is the proliferation of small arms contributing to their ready availability in the period 1970-2000, which has led to the phenomenon of child soldiers as we know it today.
For USD 5 one can find a serviceable weapon in most countries in the developing world.
She added that it takes a child an average only 40 minutes to master an AK-47, one of the most common weapons used around the world.
Former child soldier and international phenomenon in the music world Emmanuel Jal was also at the conference, where he described his experiences fighting as a child in southern Sudan for five years before being rescued and escaping to Kenya.
The United States has over 500 Iraqi children in custody, and have another unkown number that they have transferred to Iraqi custody over the course of the war in Iraq. Human rights organizations have voiced loud concern over the detention of the children, some who have been imprisoned for up to five years. Human Rights Watch in particular, has stated that rather than being detained and face punishment, these children should be rehabilitated and released.
US military authorities, operating as the Multinational Forces in Iraq, were as of May 12, 2008 holding 513 Iraqi children as “imperative threats to security,” and have transferred an unknown number of other children to Iraqi custody. According to a recent report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), children in Iraqi custody are at risk of physical abuse.
criticizing the US for its treatment of children detained in Iraq and Guantanamo, abuses by military recruiters in the United States, and inadequate protections for former child soldiers seeking asylum in the United States. The report urged the US to adopt a range of legal and policy reforms, and to expedite federal legislation that would allow for the prosecution of child recruiters abroad and limit US military assistance to governments involved in the use of child soldiers.
Background from Human Rights Watch on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child:
The Committee on the Rights of the Child is the UN body of experts responsible for monitoring countries’ compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its two optional protocols, including the protocol on the involvement of children in armed conflict.
“The US recognizes child soldiers as victims in countries like Sierra Leone or Angola, but when US forces are involved, it’s a different story,” said Becker. “The US should adopt consistent policies recognizing that these children have been exploited by military commanders and are in need of rehabilitation, not punishment.”
Let’s encourage the U.S. not to operate with this double standard.
Earlier today, Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo asked judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue an arrest warrant for the president of Sudan on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was following up on his statement last Thursday, where Moreno-Ocampo announced “that he would submit evidence of crimes committed against civilians in Sudan’s western region of Darfur over the last five years.” As of today, the arrest warrants have been sought.
The pre-trial chamber will now review the evidence presented by Luis Moreno Ocampo and the judges could, in an unprecedented step, issue the warrant if they determine that prime facie case exists against Bashir.
If the warrants are issued by the judges on the ICC, President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir would be the first sitting or former head of state to be charged with genocide at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.
There are concerns however of a serious backlash against in Sudan against peacekeepers and aid workers. See this article:
U.N. officials are concerned that the request for warrants could cause the Sudanese government to retaliate against peacekeepers and aid workers in Darfur — or even eject them. Humanitarian groups have been withdrawing staff members from remote areas and preparing for demonstrations or attacks in response to Moreno-Ocampo’s actions Monday.
Since 2003, Sudanese government forces and government-backed militias known as “Janjaweed” have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes on a massive scale as part of counter-insurgency operations in Darfur. They have directly attacked civilian populations from land and air and have carried out widespread summary execution, rape, torture, and pillaging of property.
As mentioned in this earlier posting, Lubanga, accused of kidnapping and recruiting child soldiers by the thousands in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), faced the possibility of release after five days.
Thankfully, the ICC recognized the impact his release would have both on his victims and on the region, acknowledging that it could further ignite regional violence. From Reuters:
The judges said last week they had given full consideration to the fears of Lubanga’s alleged victims, who have warned that freeing the former warlord could ignite a “fire ball” in Congo’s volatile Ituri region.
Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is reported to be confident that the trial will resume in September. No more mistakes from the prosecution please!
It is estimated that more than 25,000 children have been kidnapped and forced to fight in some capacity in the decades-old conflict in Uganda (started in the early 1980s). Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has denied accusations that his army has recruited and kidnapped children. And while UN chief Ban Ki-moon has noted that:
…owing to the apparent absence of LRA from Ugandan terrority, there have been no recent cases of recruitement and use of Ugandan children, or other grave violations against children attributable to LRA…
he says that:
children and women are still present in the LRA ranks, and there has been no movement on their release. There are reports alleging that LRA has been recruiting children from southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
According to this article, however, the LRA says they have released all the children as requested by the United Nations and insist that the ones remaining in their ranks are family members of the Army.
Happily, mounting public pressure from neighboring countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, is partly what has prompted the LRA to release the children and stop recruiting. The more we negatively publicize these non-state actors that are harboring child soldiers, the more likely they are to release them in order to maintain their legitimacy as organizations.
