Two Burmese children a week conscripted into military

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Burma, Child Soldiers

Two Burmese children a week conscripted into military

Children are being sold as conscripts into the Burmese military for as little as $40 and a bag of rice or a can of petrol. Despite assurances from Burma’s ruling junta that it is cleaning up its act in a bid to see Western sanctions lifted, recruitment of child soldiers remains rampant.

The Independent understands that 24 instances of children being forced to become soldiers have been verified by the UN in the first three months of 2012 alone – the equivalent of two a week. The International Labour Organisation is investigating a further 72 complaints for underage recruitment between January and April this year. The new details of child soldier recruitment have emerged at a time when Burma is desperately trying to attract foreign investors and persuade Western nations to lift sanctions against the country’s ruling military elite.

Some significant steps have been made, including recent parliamentary elections for a handful of seats and the release of prominent opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who flew into Britain last night for her first visit in more than 20 years. The fact that Burma’s generals have allowed Ms Suu Kyi to embark on a European tour is an indication that it has changed some of its ways. Known as The Lady to her supporters, the 66-year-old’s release is part of a series of recent public shows by the junta to curry favour with the international community.

Many observers, particularly in the business community, have begun lobbying for an easing of sanctions. British businesses are keen to re-enter Burma, partly because so many Asian economies have already done so and it is seen as an untapped market. But human rights groups are concerned that reforms have been implemented very slowly. They point to the ongoing recruitment of child soldiers as an example of how little has really changed. Researchers for Child Soldiers International have just returned from a trip to Rangoon and the Thai border in which they interviewed child conscripts. They reported that military and civilian brokers scour the streets looking for vulnerable children whose identity documents are then forged to make them seem over 18. Soldiers who want to leave the army often have to find three to five replacements and young teenagers are often the first people they look to conscript.

“Children remain vulnerable to forced recruitment and use in hostilities by the Burmese military, due to the high rates of attrition in the army and the on-going conflict,” said Richard Clarke, director of Child Soldiers International, a London based advocacy organisation. “It is incumbent on the international community to put pressure on the Burmese government to stop this practice.”

Aung Myo Min, a Burmese exile who helps child soldiers from neighbouring Thailand, has concerns about sanctions being lifted without meaningful reform.

“Don’t be so quick to jump into Burma with business,” he warned. “It is still a country which has very little protection for its workforce, let alone the military. The government really wants these sanctions lifted but we still have repression.”

Case study: ‘No one checked our ID or age’

San Win Htut was 15 when he was drafted into the military. He left this year after human rights groups found documents proving he was a minor.

I met a sergeant on the road in June 2010. He said he was from the army and persuaded me to join. He said I could earn good money and buy a motorcycle. I didn’t have a job so I decided to go with him. He said I could leave the army after five years. I then went to a recruitment camp in Rangoon. Three other youths were taken with me and we were all under 18. Officials did not check our ID because the sergeant told them he knew us. Our days were filled with hard work. We were placed on sentry duty and ordered to work on farms. Everyone treated us badly because we were the youngest. They forced us to spend our salary on their drink and food. I was beaten up by a corporal because I did not buy oil for him. I eventually managed to run away.

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

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Child Soldiers, Teens, war, War Crimes

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

Militias loyal to the former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo are recruiting child soldiers in Liberia to launch attacks similar to that which caused the death last week of 15 people, including seven UN peacekeepers.

Child soldiers as young as 14 are being groomed in training camps and used as scouts in increasingly deadly attacks in the volatile west of Ivory Coast, witnesses said. Human Rights Watch said that youths aged between 14 and 17 were being trained.

“They call us ‘small boys unit,’ and we are always safe when we go to the war zones in Ivory Coast. I don’t know the total that we have killed,” a child soldier told the campaigning group.

Ivory Coast’s rugged western region is a stronghold of Gbagbo, whose refusal to leave power landed him in the international criminal court last May after five months of post-electoral conflict dislodged him.

But neighbouring Liberia has been reluctant to clamp down on mercenaries notorious for recruiting child soldiers, while high-profile members of the regime’s inner circle live unhindered in upmarket villas in Ghana despite international arrest warrants.

“There are training camps in Liberia, you can walk there in 20 minutes. They send boys over several hours before attacks, then they join in later,” said Traore Adama, an Ivorian soldier who fled to Abidjan after attacks in recent months. “Youths can make up to a third of the attacking groups. Some of them are older teenagers but others are waifs you’d never imagine carrying guns.”

On Friday, UN “blue helmets”, deployed to a suspected raid in a remote western village, were ambushed and killed by a large group of Liberian-based “militias or mercenaries,” Paul Koffi Koffi, Ivory Coast’s deputy defence minister, said. Eight civilians also died in the attack.

Liberia has since closed its 435-mile border with Ivory Coast, whose dense forests and maze of creeks make policing difficult. Hundreds began fleeing the mineral-rich region, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded in the massacres during last year’s political conflict.

Alassane Ouattara, president of Ivory Coast since 2010, has struggled to unify a post-conflict army composed of quarrelling former rebels (who are also accused of war crimes) and government soldiers whom they once fought against.

One former rebel soldier, Aboubacar Souleymane, said” “It’s very visible when an attack is imminent. Last week I told my superiors that Liberian mercenaries were planning an attack with the help of pro-Gbagbo supporters in the area. He said there was not enough evidence, so I fled the area. I wasn’t prepared to stay there and get killed.

“There are too many cases of soldiers not being on their post when they should be, and disappearing from barracks at odd hours.”

Officials say arms funding for the cross-border raids comes from Ghana, where several wanted Gbagbo insiders fled after the regime fell last year. Among them is Charles Blé Goudé, leader of the Young Patriots militia, whose armed supporters helped crush dissenters of the Gbagbo regime. Goudé, whom sources say is under investigation by the ICC, has said he is willing to face trial.

An African diplomat said cooperation was unlikely to be forthcoming from either of Ivory Coast’s neighbours in the near future. “Liberia’s armed forces’ capability is limited by its small size and corruption because they’re highly underpaid. But there’s more than just a lack of capacity in both countries for failing to go after well-known criminals.”

Tens of thousands flee ‘extreme violence’ in Congo

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Child Soldiers, Congo, Genocide, internally displaced people, massacre, mutilation, rape, Rwanda, Torture, war

Tens of thousands flee ‘extreme violence’ in Congo

Villagers and townspeople in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo are facing “extreme violence” with atrocities including mass executions, abductions, mutilations and rapes being committed almost daily, according to aid workers in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

Fighting between the government army, the FARDC, and a group of mutineers led by a fugitive UN war crimes indictee, Bosco Ntaganda, has escalated since April. Armed militias including the notorious FDLR, a Rwandan rebel group based in Congo, have joined the fray in a multi-fronted battle for territory, money and power. But the violence has received relatively little international attention so far.

“The crisis in Congo is the worst it has been for years. The activity of armed groups has exploded, with militias making the most of the chaos to prey on the local population,” Samuel Dixon, Oxfam’s policy adviser in Goma, said on Wednesday. “Large areas of [North and South] Kivu are under the control of different armed groups – some villages are being terrorised from all sides, with up to five groups battling for power.

“Local people are bearing the brunt of extreme violence, facing the risk of massacre, rape, retaliation, abduction, mutilation, forced labour or extortion … In less than two months, more than 100,000 people in North Kivu have been forced to flee,” Dixon said.

Expressing alarm at the deteriorating situation, the UN refugee agency said the violence had sent tens of thousands of refugees spilling over the border into Rwanda and Uganda, while many more people were internally displaced.

Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said UN agencies and the Red Cross would soon begin to distribute relief supplies. “Some of the displaced report cases of extortion, forced labour, forced recruitment of minors and beatings by armed men,” Fleming said.

Aid workers said heightened instability was making it difficult to establish the true extent of the violence and to get supplies to those most in need, who had often taken refuge in remote, inaccessible areas.

“The mutiny in North Kivu is part of a broader picture of insecurity caused by multiple armed groups and by elements of the Congolese forces. Since the FARDC has been fighting the mutiny, other armed groups active in eastern Congo have opportunistically moved into areas left vacant by the army,” an internal NGO field report seen by the Guardian stated.

“In South Kivu in early May 2012, 30 people were killed in Lumenje zone by the FDLR … During the night of 13 May, at least another 40 civilians lost their lives and 35 were injured following a brutal FDLR attack on Kamananga. This incident took place only 2kms from a Monusco base [Monusco is the name of the UN’s 20,000-strong stabilisation force in Congo].”

The report went on: “A letter left by the FDLR at the scene warned of a series of revenge attacks if the opposing group, the Raia [militia], did not stop attacking them. In the last two massacres the FDLR mutilated the dead to discourage further actions against them …

“In Mambas territory, a mai mai [militia] group reportedly raped over 70 women in the second week of May and armed clashes around Itembo allegedly led to the death of 17 civilians.”

Overall, the total number of internally displaced people in Congo is believed to be at its highest level in three years: up from 1.7 million to 2 million.

The latest upheavals follow warnings, first reported in the Guardian on 16 March, that the army’s offensive against the FDLR, launched in February, could destabilise the Kivus and have disastrous consequences. Controversially, the UN supported the offensive, arguing it was the best way to end chronic instability in the region.

The army’s plan went awry last month after President Joseph Kabila of Congo called for the arrest of Bosco Ntaganda, an ex-rebel general whose forces were supposedly integrated into the FARDC in 2009.

Ntaganda is wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes, including the recruitment of child soldiers, but had appeared to be enjoying to official protection. His response to Kabila’s call for his arrest was to lead a mutiny of former officers and hundreds of their men, who have formed a new rebel group called M23.

“Civilian safety has to be the number one priority for the UN and the government army,” Dixon said. “Military action against rebels must not put local people at further risk. It is unacceptable that such widespread violence in Congo goes unstopped and under-reported. More must be done to tackle the political and underlying drivers of the conflict.”

DRC: Thorny issue of reparations for Lubanga’s victims

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Child Soldiers, Children, DRC, ICC, Reparations, Sexual Violence, trauma, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2012/apr/12/congo-reparations-lubanga-child-soldiers

Motorcycles, school fees, counselling, cash: Thomas Lubanga’s kadogo (child soldiers) know what reparations they want from the international criminal court(ICC). Less clear is what a cash-strapped tribunal can offer damaged children taken from their families and forced to fight in a brutal ethnic conflict in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“They expect something that will really help them to heal, to help them to recover from the loss of their childhood, their education,” said Bukeni Waruzi, an expert on child soldiers and the programme manager for Africa and the Middle East at the NGO Witness. “When a child is recruited, the minute he gets in the camp, he is not the same as before. It doesn’t take 10 years for a child to become a child soldier, it takes two days maximum, and the mind is changed. How do you repair that?”

Lubanga was convicted in March on three charges of recruiting and using child soldiers in the military wing of his Union of Congolese Patriots in 2002 and 2003. His ICC trial heard that children as young as nine served as fighters and bodyguards.

It was the ICC’s first-ever verdict, and the court is now heading into unfamiliar legal territory as judges must decide on reparations for Lubanga’s victims.

No other international criminal tribunal has ever awarded reparations, but under ICC rules those who have suffered injury or harm from a crime for which someone is convicted could receive restitution, compensation or rehabilitation.

“The [judges] will decide on Lubanga’s sentence, this is first step,” said Paolina Massidda, principal counsel of the ICC’s office of the public counsel for victims, which provides support to victims, including legal representation. Under the ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome statute, court-recognised victims are given lawyers and allowed to participate throughout a trial, including questioning witnesses.

“It is possible then for the court to start reparations proceedings, but there is no clear established procedure – which is the reason why the judges are asking participants [in the case] to provide observations, among other things, on whether reparations should be awarded collectively or on an individual basis, to whom, and how harm could be assessed.”

Luc Walleyn, who along with a Congolese lawyer represents 19 victims, doubts collective reparations would work for his clients – former child soldiers and their families. “Child soldiers are not a community,” he said. “It is not like a village that has been victimised. They are very often in conflict with their own families. I cannot see my clients as a group. They are really individuals.

“If today you asked my clients how they wish to have reparations, the answers would be quite different from one to another. One will say I would like to start my studies again. Another would say I would like to have a motorcycle so I can … run a taxi business. A lot of them say ‘give me money’.”

But experts warn that cash payouts are unlikely, and many will get nothing unless they can prove to the court that they were harmed by Lubanga’s crimes. Waruzi worries this will be disappointing to the former child soldiers, who are largely uneducated and untrained. Many suffer from drug addiction or diseases, including HIV. Others have been victims of sexual violence.

“The victims think that what they want will be provided,” he said. “A child thinks, ‘I have been a victim. I shall get reparations because I won the case. Will they give me money? Will they give me a car? Will they buy me a house? How much will I receive?’ I think that’s what’s in the mind of the child soldiers.”

He wants reparations that match the scale and scope of the crimes. “The ICC was initially thinking of symbolic reparations,” Waruzi said. “They were saying something like building a statue in the village that will really honour the victims. But reparations cannot be symbolic, because the crimes were not symbolic. It is now for the ICC to take full responsibility, to actually manage the expectations.”

On trial since January 2009 and in custody since 2005, Lubanga was declared indigent and given a legal aid lawyer. This will be reassessed by judges in the coming weeks. If he cannot pay for reparations himself, the court may turn to its Trust Fund for Victims, which supports reparations from the voluntary contributions it receives from ICC members and others. In 2011 the fund’s total annual income was €3.2m. It has ring-fenced €1.2m for court-ordered reparations.

Though his resources are “modest” and the number of ICC cases expanding fast, the executive director of the fund’s secretariat prefers to talk about meeting rather than managing expectations. But Pieter de Baan admits the fund has been keeping a deliberately low profile on reparations until the judges decide how the process will work.

“Our plan is that once we have more information coming from the chambers on which direction they would like to go we will tailor the messages we will be sending out to communities,” said De Baan.

“The current message is that the trust fund is not a fund for all victims of all crimes in all places but is very much limited by the legal framework of the Rome statute. It also doesn’t take away any of the responsibilities that the national government may have, to look after victimised communities. That will be part of the message as well.”

Reparations are only one part of the fund’s work. Operating under its general assistance rather than reparations mandate it has been on the ground in eastern DRC and northern Uganda since 2008, offering vocational training, trauma counselling, reconciliation workshops and reconstructive surgery to more than 80,000 victims. This close contact has convinced De Baan that the best reparations are those that help people to get on with their lives.

“They might like to have some sort of reparation that would acknowledge their victimhood and their dignity as human beings that allows them to rebuild their lives in a way that is meaningful and sustainable,” he said.

Analysts agree that reparations are a legal and social minefield. The potential problems – and solutions – are already filling pages of legal submissions to the judges.

In its filing to the court, the ICC’s registry warns that because Lubanga recruited children from his own Hema community, which was in conflict with the Lendu people, “should reparations be awarded in the case, the majority of victims will be from one side of an ethnic conflict in which both sides suffered harm”.

The registry also cautions against “ill-advised reparation orders [which] may worsen the situation of former child soldiers by increasing the children’s stigmatisation within their own community”. It also questions how eligible victims will be found, as some have moved on from their villages.

Carla Ferstman, director of Redress, a human rights group working with war crimes victims, urges the judges to consider the many existing rulings on reparations. They come from truth commissions and regional courts, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

“It’s not like the ICC will have to start from scratch,” said Ferstman. “We hope that the court isn’t going to try and reinvent the wheel but that it is going to look at all of these different kinds of processes. There is a lot of experience out there.”

She said it is essential the ICC gets this right. “Ensuring there is some manner of reparations is part of this vital rebalancing of the criminal justice process to involve victims not only as observers and witnesses – [something] that makes it clear that what happened to them matters. It is like a humanisation of criminal justice.”

But with so many potential pitfalls, there are fears that the reparations process could drag on as long as the trial. Walleyn says the former child soldiers he represents have become disillusioned after years of waiting. “They have fewer expectations than six years ago,” he said. “However, they are still hoping to see something, because that was what was promised by the system of the court.”

International criminal court to deliver its first judgment

Tags

Child Soldiers, DRC, Genocide, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/mar/13/international-criminal-court-first-judgment

Nearly a decade after its inception, the international criminal court is due to deliver its first judgment on Wednesday.

Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese alleged warlord, stands accused of enlisting and conscripting child soldiers.

Prosecutors allege that Lubanga, 51, sought to maintain and expand his control over the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo‘s Ituri region, home to one of the world’s most lucrative gold reserves.

Children as young as 11 were allegedly recruited from their homes and schools to take part in brutal ethnic fighting in 2002-03. They were taken to military training camps and beaten and drugged, prosecutors claim, while girls were used as sex slaves.

Lubanga, the alleged founder of the rebel group the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) and chief commander of its military wing, went on trial in January 2009. Closing arguments were heard last August. Lubanga pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes.

Wednesday’s verdict will be closely watched by global rights groups. Géraldine Mattioli-Zeltner, the international justice advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Guilty or innocent, the ICC’s first verdict is a landmark moment for international justice. Leaders of countries and rebel groups should take note that crimes committed today may put them in the international dock tomorrow.”

The ICC, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, opened in July 2002 to prosecute the perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity.

But progress has been too slow in the eyes of critics. Lubanga, seen as a relatively “small fish” compared to the likes of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, was first transferred to the ICC headquarters at The Hague six years ago.

William Schabas, professor of international law at Middlesex University, told Reuters: “The prosecutor is woefully behind schedule. We are all relieved we got to this point.

“But the big legal judgments, of the kind we had at the Yugoslav, Rwanda and Sierra Leone tribunals, we are still waiting for from the ICC right now. The ICC has not yet done that.”

Backed by 120 countries – but not China or the US – the ICC has launched investigations in seven conflict regions, all of them African, since it opened.

Schabas criticised the lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, for a narrow focus. “He avoided situations where he would be likely to step on the toes of permanent members of the UN security council, from Afghanistan to Gaza to Iraq to Colombia.”

The court has no police force and relies on the support of states to deliver suspects for trial. Last December Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo became the first former head of state to appear at the ICC.

The verdict due from a three-judge bench on Wednesday is also the first at an international trial focused exclusively on the use of child soldiers.

The case will set legal precedents that could be used if the likes of Joseph Kony, the elusive leader of the Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army, are captured and brought to justice.