Children as war victims

The Impact of War on Children by Graca Machel, photographs by Sebastiao Salgado; Orient Longman Ltd, 2001; pages 230, Rs.350.

TWO million children died in armed conflict in the 1990s, according to information supplied by the United Nations Children's Fund. More than three times this number were permanently disabled or injured seriously. War has uprooted more than 20 million children from their homes the world over; now they are either refugees or internally displaced persons in their own countries. At any given time, more than 300,000 children are used in hostilities as soldiers.

To these statistics, Graca Machel and photographer Sebastiao Salgado, in their powerful and path-breaking documentation of children as the intended and unintended targets of war and armed conflict, put faces and names and the details of place and time, the precise theatres of conflict, and the brutal forms war assumes. The report is a strong indictment of the architects of wars, adults unconcerned about their effects on children who are not theirs.

Graca Machel, a former Minister for Education in Mozambique, was appointed independent expert by the U.N. Secretary-General in September 1994 to undertake a comprehensive study of the impact of armed conflict on children. This was an outcome of the adoption in 1993 by the U.N. General Assembly of Resolution 48/157, on the "Protection of Children Affected by Armed Conflict". Her report was submitted to the General Assembly in November 1996. The book under review is based on this report, but takes the study forward by assessing the progress and problems in the efforts to protect children at risk from war in the five years following its publication. It also draws together information on the new forms of war-related violence against children, such as the danger from human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), especially within war-ravaged countries, and the dangers arising out of the spread and easy availability of small arms and light weapons.

A summary of the findings in this book was presented before the International Conference on War-affected Children, which was held in Winnipeg, Canada, in September 2000.

The belief that armed conflict is an unconscionable assault on the lives and world of children, the most undeserving and utterly vulnerable of its victims, is one that is often voiced by human rights and child rights organisations, individuals and, on occasion, by governments. The media from time to time document the plight of children affected in a particular theatre of war. The media visuals of child soldiers of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) - scrawny, grinning little boys in fatigues, flaunting their AK-47's as if engaged in a game of toy soldiers - sharpened the outrage against the cynical exploitation of children by that organisation as part of its deadly enterprise of war and terror. This is only one example.

Yet, in order to build an international consensus among governments and armed political movements on the need to inure child populations from the impact of war, precise documentation of its real life impact on children in different parts of the world needed to be compiled. Graca Machel's exhaustive report based on authentic data and sensitive reportage establishes the magnitude of the problem the world over in its specificities, its short- and long-term impact. The global reach of such a project could only have been possible with the cooperation of an organisation such as the U.N., which has the financial resources and expertise to provide credible and consistent data. The work was of course commissioned by the U.N., and Graca Machel has put its network to the best possible use in her project.

Graca Machel's documentation of children as recruits in armed conflict indicates how shockingly widespread the practice is. Most child recruits into armies are from poor families or from minority or indigenous groups. Myanmar has the highest numbers of active child soldiers in the world, both in governmental forces and in armed rebel groups. Quoting an Inter-national Labour Organ-isation (ILO) report, the author says that in Myanmar children as young as 10 years have been used to work as porters or to sweep roads for landmines with brooms and tree branches. The army is known to carry out recruitment campaigns in schools and forcibly enlist children in the 15-17 age group. Angola has an estimated 3,000 child soldiers, a large number of them recruited from neighbouring countries. In Sri Lanka, the LTTE created two armed units - the Baby Brigade and the Leopard Brigade - formed entirely of children. Graca Machel notes that in 1997-98 madrassas in Pakistan provided the Taliban with thousands of Afghan and Pakistani child recruits. There are details of how child soldiers are used. In most armies that employ children, both boys and girls are forced to provide sexual services, and this exposes them to the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.

The author lists the many international and regional legal standards that have been set up to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers and how or whether they have been effective. In May 2000, the General Assembly adopted an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, on the involvement of children in armed conflict. While the Protocol bans non-governmental forces from recruiting persons below 18 years of age, it does not lay down the same rule for states. The United Kingdom, a signatory to the Protocol, took advantage of this loophole by stating that it would reserve the right to deploy persons below 18 in the event of a military need.

The book's canvas takes in the issues of children forced to flee from war, children under threat from HIV/AIDS, the heightened exposure of children to sexual exploitation during armed conflict, the impact of war on the health of children, the threats from landmines and unexploded ordnance; the protection of children from sanctions, and child protection and the creation of an agenda of peace and security for children. Some of the other issues that are examined in the book, which forms the basis for a call for action, are the ending of the impunity for crimes against children; ensuring the central place for children on the peace and security agenda; monitoring and reporting on child rights violations in conflict; responding to the gender dimensions of conflict and peace-building; protecting children under threat from HIV/AIDS; improving the collection of information and data on children in conflict and their analysis; training and sensitisation on child rights; mobilising resources for war-affected children; and supporting civil society to protect children.

The wealth of information on how war and armed conflict impact on children underlies Graca Machel's impassioned appeal to keep children out of war, if war itself cannot be stopped. Yet the spotlight is not as relentlessly focussed on the perpetrators of war and on governments that have not done what they could to keep children out of war. For example, the sanctions on Iraq since 1990, "the longest running and most severe comprehensive international sanctions," Graca Machel says, have taken an enormous toll on Iraqi children. An estimated half a million children (five million, according to many organisations) have died during the current sanctions regime. Yet Graca Machel glosses over the United States government's role in pushing the regime of crippling sanctions on Iraq. The U.S. has a particularly bad record on putting its signature to international agreements and covenants. There are, for example, just two countries that have not ratified the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, which offers the most comprehensive protection for children during war and in peace time. They are Somalia and the United States. In fact, since the publication of the book there has been a major war in Afghanistan, led by the U.S. and its Western allies, where 'collateral damage' (including the death or displacement of thousands of children) was an issue never discussed by the U.S. government.