| As the main UN organ responsible for maintaining international peace and security, the UN Security Council has had this matter formally on its agenda since 1999. What has it done about the situation? It has established a "name and shame" list of groups using child soldiers and actively victimizing children. Those who abduct, abuse and brutalize children in order to use them as killers are supposed to be "shamed" by having their groups named in a UN document. The Council met last week to expand the list. Other choice bits of UN madness include the following: Disarmament Conference: On 1 July, Ambassador So Se Pyong of North Korea took over the rotating chairmanship of the Geneva-based Disarmament Conference, the world's only multilateral body to negotiate arms control. Most countries ignored the absurdity of the situation but the Canadians, earnest as ever, declared they would boycott the body till his six month term is over. ECOSOC: July is when the world's diplomats gather for the annual meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the main coordinating organ of the UN System. It is when the world is hit with a ton of new reports, estimates and projections. Among the notable (if not entirely laudable) efforts this year are the following: World Economic Survey: Produced by the central secretariat of the UN in New York, this 280-page report calls for the greening of the world economy at the cost of $72 trillion over the next 40 years. This is a pipedream; the total GDP of the United States is $14.6 trillion. Millennium Development Goals: A 72-page report from the UN tells about progress towards the goal (set by world leaders in 2000), of halving world poverty by 2015. China and India have made significant progress because of their rapid economic growth. The report projects China to have only 5 percent of its 1.4 billion people living in poverty in 2015. India, with a matching population, will have 22 percent below the poverty line then; it used to be 51 per cent in 1990. Sub-Saharan Africa has made very slow progress; 58 percent of its people lived in poverty in 1990; by 2005 that had fallen only to 51 per cent. If the world economy should sink into the cataclysmic crisis that now seems to be building in the financial systems of Europe and China, all projections will have to be radically recalculated. African Development: The UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), note that Africa accounts only for 1 per cent of global manufacturing and recommend increasing that share. As is historically true of UN reports, UNIDO and UNCTAD do not look at any of the real reasons for Africa’s miserable economic performance – instability, war and corruption, all part of the continued and scandalous neo-colonial exploitation of the continent. |
Showing posts with label Children in war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Children in war. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Midsummer Madness at the UN
Over the last decade an estimated 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts and 6 million left disabled. Around 300,000 children now serve as soldiers. Little girls fare the worst. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, reported last month that "sexual violence is becoming systemic and across the world, classrooms and the kids sitting in them are increasingly seen as legitimate targets."
UN Reform: Efforts to improve the performance of the United Nations were briefly energized after the Obama administration signalled its intention to seriously engage in multilateral diplomacy, but they are now back to normal. As in a Noh drama, the action is glue-like, the plot incomprehensible, and the whole thing of interest only to afficianados. There is need for a radical change of focus and approach, but UN member States are so reluctant to give up the devil they know that it is impossible to entertain the slightest hope of real change. (For what is necessary to bring about real UN reform see my Discussion Paper; this is a topic on which we need to get a global conversation going.)
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Child Soldiers, UNMEE and the Vision Thing
When UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met President Bush at the White House last Friday, there was an exchange of civilities that is worth noting. Mr. Bush expressed appreciation for Ban's "vision" and said "thank you for your leadership and your friendship." Ban thanked Bush for supporting the UN, noting that the "United States is the country with the most ability for technology and financing capacities." The UN's partnership with Washington, he said, "is the crucial and important element in carrying out my duty as Secretary General, and also making the United Nations organization more strengthened in carrying out the common challenges we share together."
That might have been the high point in the UN week. The low points were the debate in the Security Council on Children and Armed Conflict, and the humiliating blackmail of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritea (UNMEE) by the thuggish regime in Asmara.
The debate on children was deeply disheartening. It is now over 33 years since the General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the protection of women and children in emergencies and armed conflict. In the years since then it has also adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, convened a World Summit on Children in 1990, and received the ground-breaking report on children and armed conflict by Graça Machel in 1996. The widow of President Samora Machel of Mozambique (he was killed in an air crash over South Africa in 1986), summed up the enormity of the problem. Just in the past decade, she reported:
"an estimated two million children have been killed in armed conflict. Three times as many have been seriously injured or permanently disabled, many of them maimed by landmines. Countless others have been forced to witness or even to take part in horrifying acts of violence.These statistics are shocking enough, but more chilling is the conclusion to be drawn from them: more and more of the world is being sucked into a desolate moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. Such unregulated terror and violence speak of deliberate victimization. There are few further depths to which humanity can sink."
More than a decade after those powerful words, the Security Council has done nothing effective to deal with the problem. For seven years it has received increasingly specific annual reports from the Secretary-General on this most unequivocal of moral issues, and done no more than call -- in 2005 -- for a "monitoring and reporting mechanism" that has neither funding nor structure. (The UN System is supposed to do the job with existing resources.) For the last five years, 16 groups using child soldiers have been named in every annual report of the Secretary-General, but rather than establish a sanctions committee and initiate meaningful action, all the Council has done is set up a Working Group. UN afficionados actually cite that as "progress."
In the Council debate there was little self-recrimination. The only speakers to highlight the lack of action by the Council were those who provided the introductory briefings. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Secretary-General's Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, noted that the Council had already expressed its intention to take concrete and targeted measures against groups that used child soldiers, and that it was important to make good on that pledge for the sake of credibility. “It is now time that the Security Council move from words toward effective action,” she said, suggesting that measures could include travel restrictions on the leaders of the groups named, their exclusion from any governance structures and amnesty provisions; the imposition of arms embargoes; and restrictions on the flow of financial resources. Jo Becker of the non-governmental organization Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict was blunter. She stressed that the Council could not expect to achieve accountability based on "empty threats." To ensure its own credibility, it should move to targeted sanctions.
Government delegates all declared themselves in favor of action to save children, but none took the Council to task for being so lethargic. Quite to the contrary. The United States did not agree that the Council should have a general policy or practice of referring cases to the International Criminal Court, as recommended in the Secretary-General’s report. States had different views about the best mechanism for combating crimes against children, and it was important to bear in mind that not all Member States were parties to the Rome Statute.
Slovenia, speaking for the European Union, encouraged the Council to take "appropriate and concrete measures" against the groups named in the Secretary-General's report, but went on to suggest a minimalist "first step:" including the crime of rape and other grave sexual and gender-based violence against children in the criteria triggering inclusion in the UN list of offenders. Belgium thought that listing offenders in UN reports was in itself "an important dissuance instrument."
France (represented by that irredeemable ham Bernard Kouchner in full Falstaffian flow), said “the tragedy of child soldiers forces us to be determined and uncompromising,”and that the United Nations "must play a central role in combating this heinous form of slavery which turns victims into assassins.” The Council, he said, must not shrink from the adoption of strong, targeted measures against parties that failed to comply with its recommendations.
The Council did nothing. It issued a statement that once again called for action -- at the national level.
On the UNMEE situation the Security Council met in "emergency session" on Friday afternoon for a briefing by Jean-Marie Gu¿henno, the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping. The briefing focused on the latest bid by Asmara to blackmail the UN into acting on the findings of an impartial boundary commission which demarcated the Eritrea-Ethiopia border under a 2000 peace agreement. The commission awarded the city of Badme to Eritrea, but Ethiopia refused to move out the forces that had taken the city in the 1998 war. All last week the UN repeatedly and ineffectually protested Eritrea's threats, seizures of equipment, and blockages of food and fuel deliveries to UNMEE.
Typically, the Security Council has been focused on minutiae. The basic problem of the countries along Africa's Red Sea coast has been the clash of foreign interests in an area of great strategic and economic importance. The Red Sea, with the Suez Canal at one end and oil-rich Saudi Arabia on its northern shore, is the busiest waterway in the world. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union achieved strategic dominance of the African coast by installing client regimes in Ethiopia and Somalia, intensifying the bloody power struggles that (in their modern incarnation), began with the Anglo-French rivalry over Egypt in the 18th century and continued with Mussolini's grab of Ethiopia during the run-up to World War I. The discovery of oil in the Sudan, and China's ever heavier footprint in the area (Eritrean dictator Isais Afwerki studied in Beijing), has increased the complexity of the situation. None of this is even mentioned in the extensive UN documentation of the problems of the area.
That might have been the high point in the UN week. The low points were the debate in the Security Council on Children and Armed Conflict, and the humiliating blackmail of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritea (UNMEE) by the thuggish regime in Asmara.
***
The debate on children was deeply disheartening. It is now over 33 years since the General Assembly adopted a Declaration on the protection of women and children in emergencies and armed conflict. In the years since then it has also adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, convened a World Summit on Children in 1990, and received the ground-breaking report on children and armed conflict by Graça Machel in 1996. The widow of President Samora Machel of Mozambique (he was killed in an air crash over South Africa in 1986), summed up the enormity of the problem. Just in the past decade, she reported:
"an estimated two million children have been killed in armed conflict. Three times as many have been seriously injured or permanently disabled, many of them maimed by landmines. Countless others have been forced to witness or even to take part in horrifying acts of violence.These statistics are shocking enough, but more chilling is the conclusion to be drawn from them: more and more of the world is being sucked into a desolate moral vacuum. This is a space devoid of the most basic human values; a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. Such unregulated terror and violence speak of deliberate victimization. There are few further depths to which humanity can sink."
More than a decade after those powerful words, the Security Council has done nothing effective to deal with the problem. For seven years it has received increasingly specific annual reports from the Secretary-General on this most unequivocal of moral issues, and done no more than call -- in 2005 -- for a "monitoring and reporting mechanism" that has neither funding nor structure. (The UN System is supposed to do the job with existing resources.) For the last five years, 16 groups using child soldiers have been named in every annual report of the Secretary-General, but rather than establish a sanctions committee and initiate meaningful action, all the Council has done is set up a Working Group. UN afficionados actually cite that as "progress."
In the Council debate there was little self-recrimination. The only speakers to highlight the lack of action by the Council were those who provided the introductory briefings. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Secretary-General's Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, noted that the Council had already expressed its intention to take concrete and targeted measures against groups that used child soldiers, and that it was important to make good on that pledge for the sake of credibility. “It is now time that the Security Council move from words toward effective action,” she said, suggesting that measures could include travel restrictions on the leaders of the groups named, their exclusion from any governance structures and amnesty provisions; the imposition of arms embargoes; and restrictions on the flow of financial resources. Jo Becker of the non-governmental organization Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict was blunter. She stressed that the Council could not expect to achieve accountability based on "empty threats." To ensure its own credibility, it should move to targeted sanctions.
Government delegates all declared themselves in favor of action to save children, but none took the Council to task for being so lethargic. Quite to the contrary. The United States did not agree that the Council should have a general policy or practice of referring cases to the International Criminal Court, as recommended in the Secretary-General’s report. States had different views about the best mechanism for combating crimes against children, and it was important to bear in mind that not all Member States were parties to the Rome Statute.
Slovenia, speaking for the European Union, encouraged the Council to take "appropriate and concrete measures" against the groups named in the Secretary-General's report, but went on to suggest a minimalist "first step:" including the crime of rape and other grave sexual and gender-based violence against children in the criteria triggering inclusion in the UN list of offenders. Belgium thought that listing offenders in UN reports was in itself "an important dissuance instrument."
France (represented by that irredeemable ham Bernard Kouchner in full Falstaffian flow), said “the tragedy of child soldiers forces us to be determined and uncompromising,”and that the United Nations "must play a central role in combating this heinous form of slavery which turns victims into assassins.” The Council, he said, must not shrink from the adoption of strong, targeted measures against parties that failed to comply with its recommendations.
The Council did nothing. It issued a statement that once again called for action -- at the national level.
***
On the UNMEE situation the Security Council met in "emergency session" on Friday afternoon for a briefing by Jean-Marie Gu¿henno, the Under-Secretary-General for peacekeeping. The briefing focused on the latest bid by Asmara to blackmail the UN into acting on the findings of an impartial boundary commission which demarcated the Eritrea-Ethiopia border under a 2000 peace agreement. The commission awarded the city of Badme to Eritrea, but Ethiopia refused to move out the forces that had taken the city in the 1998 war. All last week the UN repeatedly and ineffectually protested Eritrea's threats, seizures of equipment, and blockages of food and fuel deliveries to UNMEE.
Typically, the Security Council has been focused on minutiae. The basic problem of the countries along Africa's Red Sea coast has been the clash of foreign interests in an area of great strategic and economic importance. The Red Sea, with the Suez Canal at one end and oil-rich Saudi Arabia on its northern shore, is the busiest waterway in the world. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union achieved strategic dominance of the African coast by installing client regimes in Ethiopia and Somalia, intensifying the bloody power struggles that (in their modern incarnation), began with the Anglo-French rivalry over Egypt in the 18th century and continued with Mussolini's grab of Ethiopia during the run-up to World War I. The discovery of oil in the Sudan, and China's ever heavier footprint in the area (Eritrean dictator Isais Afwerki studied in Beijing), has increased the complexity of the situation. None of this is even mentioned in the extensive UN documentation of the problems of the area.
