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Children in the firing line While this year's “Day of the African Child” was being celebrated, as many as 120,000 children under 18 years old, some as young as eight, were spending the day as child soldiers across the continent, reports the Amnesty International, a London-based human rights group. In a similar report five years ago, the organisation said: 300,000 children below the minimum recruiting age of 15, recommended by the UN convention on the Rights of the Child, have been recruited as soldiers from 44 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, and were participating in raging wars. At the time, according to the report, 1.5 million under 18 had died and four million children disabled and maimed in the conflicts. Altogether, calculates the Amnesty, 90 per cent of casualties in modern wars, particularly in less developed nations, are civilians, and one half of them children. A century ago, the figure was only 10 per cent. A similar report by UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for children's welfare, estimated that two million children died, and six million seriously injured or permanently disabled, in armed conflicts worldwide in the past one decade (1990-2000). The dismal picture as related to Africa was painted by a US congressman, Donald Payne, on US Information Agency's (USIA) African journal television programme of April 28, 1999, thus: “Thousands of children are being used as soldiers in conflict worldwide, but in Africa the practice has become a tremendous problem. In northern Uganda children as young as seven are being kidnapped to fight in a bloody insurgency movement supported by neighbouring Sudan. The insurgency movement, a band of outlaws known as the Lord Resistance Army (LRA), brutalises the children, teaches them elementary military training and then draws them into its fight against the Uganda government. The same thing is happening in the conflict in Sierra Leone, were children are being used as soldiers by a rebel movement with no clear political agenda. The movement specialises in hacking off the limbs of women and children it encounters.” The situation has not altered today. In all the current areas of armed conflict on the African continent — Uganda, Liberia, Congo Democratic Republic, Sudan, etc. — children are being abducted in the streets or picked from classrooms, refugee camps and playgrounds in their neighbourhoods to serve as soldiers. Some other children are compelled by war-induced separation from their families, and in some cases, death of their parents, to join armed rebel groups or their national armies. Children so recruited are indoctrinated and briefly trained in application of rifles, swords and axes, etc., for brutalities, such as beheading and hacking off limbs of their fellow human beings. The key message of the Amnesty report, or of the picture drawn here, is that modern warfare has now become in large part a war against children and that horrifying fact is no accident. Nor can the inhuman treatment and all manner of abuse to which children are subjected in wars be written off as mistakes. It is clearly a question of systematic violation of internationally agreed standards, as stated in the Geneva Conventions regarding standard of conduct of wars, and in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. All the accounts of children in wars draw a chill as they evoke horrible images of children in wars, trapped in landmines, exposed to the horrors of indiscriminate snipping with high velocity rifles and shelling by modern heavy weapons. Beyond the issue of conscription into the armies, children are generally innocent victims of wars in other ways. Apart from their being turned into refugees en masse, a good number are separated from their families either through death of heir parents or being forced to flee in different directions. In all cases children are deprived of the basic necessities of life such as food, water, health and education that they most need to grow into useful adults, and made to endure enormous psychological trauma as well as socio-economic privations that ought not to be their lot given their tender age. In all-pervading stench of human waste, gangrene and death in a war situation, children are being reduced to picking around in dirt, like chicken looking for scraps to eat. Part of the instant reaction, about five years ago, by the Amnesty International, against the use of children as soldiers is its support of a worldwide campaign to raise the recruitment age from 15 to 18 years, insisting that raising the standard will still be of value even when the 15-year-old recruiting age is widely violated. It is still left to be seen how far the human rights group will succeed in the campaign. The United States, which recruits 17-year-olds for military service, has not ratified he UN convention on the rights of the children, and has opposed the higher age of 18. Though Nigeria was one of the first nations to submit its implementation of the UN Convention and, again, among the first to ratify the related Organisation of African Unity (now African Union) Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the African Child, many African countries are yet to sign and ratify the Charter. The response of the OAU 32nd Summit in 1996 to the emotion-ladden appeal by 120 children from Africa's war zones, led by Christopher Okello, a 17-year-old former Ugandan child soldier, to African leaders to halt warlords' engagement of children as soldiers in wars on the continent, was a draft resolution on the plight of children in wars, banning the use of anti-personnel landmines and recruitment of children into the armies. Till date, this is yet to be adopted and implemented by the 53 member-states of the OAU, now AU. On April 22, this year, a resolution adopted unanimously by the 15-member United Nations (UN) Security Council mandated the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to set up within three months a comprehensive mechanism for tracking violations of international law aimed at protecting children trapped in warfare. The UN report listed 15 countries - North Ireland, Chechyna, Afghanistan, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Colombia, Myammar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Philippines and more than 40 rebel groups that recruit or use youths — 17year-old and under — in armed conflicts. In marking this year's “Day of African children,” the Amnesty International rightly and accurately spurns the recruitment and use of children under 15 in armed conflict as an egregious human rights abuse, which constitutes war crimes. And it warns: “On this Day of the African Child, African governments should sign, ratify and vigorously implement international standards which prohibit the recruitment and use of child soldiers, notably the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the African Charter of the Rights and welfare of the child.” Sure, this will considerably reduce the problem. But a surer way to stop recruitment and use of under-age children in armed conflicts and save the child from all they have to endure as a result of war is to avoid wars in the first place. This, too, will be the only adequate, positive response to the 1996 appeal by the UNICEF to governments, communities and families to guarantee their children “a peaceful country, in which education, health, proper nutrition and care are guaranteed.” To achieve this, we must dig into the roots of the wars in Africa, and begin to recognise that children are being recruited to make up for shortfalls in adult enlistment, or to fight adult wars, brought about on the continent in the past more than 40 years by coups d'etat in virtually all the African nations south of the Sahara, and sustained by manipulation of the ballot and constitutions by civilian and military dictators to perpetuate themselves in power. This being so, it is unfair and down-right unjust for children to pay the cost of wars they have no hand in bringing about, but which usually result from adults' greed ad folly.
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