Global Policy Forum

By Alan Boyd

India does it. So do Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, the Philippines, East Timor and several Central Asian states. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has labeled the practice one of the most morally reprehensible acts of systematic abuse worldwide, and even took the extraordinary step of publicly naming the culprits last year.

Yet at least 100,000 Asian children as young as eight are still being coerced to fight for government armies and armed rebel movements, according to the latest report by Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, a global human-rights alliance.

As the UN Security Council met last week to debate the predicament of children caught up in armed conflict, there was a minefield of contention over the dwindling prospects of a diplomatic solution. "Adopting resolution after resolution which fail to protect children from conflict has created 'resolution fatigue' among governments at the UN and cynicism among the public," said Casey Kelso, the coalition coordinator. "The test for the Security Council is to hold these governments and groups accountable for their actions."

Comprising eight charities and human-rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Save the Children Alliance and World Vision International, the coalition reported a general deterioration last year in the treatment of children in war zones.

In Asia, children played a significant role in the government forces of Afghanistan and Myanmar, with the junta in Myanmar alone conscripting as many as 70,000 youths under the age of 18. While the practice was not condoned at an official level elsewhere on the continent, paramilitary and rebel movements enlisted scores of other children as soldiers, sexual slaves, laborers, porters or spies on the Indian subcontinent and in some parts of Southeast Asia.

A separate study released by Annan ahead of the Security Council debate cited Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, but omitted India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and East Timor. "Exiled children told of being abducted by government forces and taken to military camps where they were subject to beatings, forced labor and combat," the human-rights coalition said of Myanmar, where there was "little if any progress" in ending the practice.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) pledged to demobilize children after a ceasefire two years ago in Sri Lanka, Asia's other leading conflict zone, but has released only 202 child fighters. The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported in another assessment this week that the LTTE recruited 709 under-age fighters in 2003, despite promises that it wouldn't enlist anyone below 18 years of age. While the average age of children utilized by the LTTE is 15, some are as young as 10. The rebel group claims that most enroll voluntarily to flee poverty or abuse from government forces.

"Our estimate is that there are 50,000 children of different categories that are directly affected by the conflict," said Ted Chaiban, UNICEF's representative in Sri Lanka. "I am speaking here of children engaged in child labor, child soldiers, children that have been displaced repeatedly, children victims of land mines." It is this social aspect, plus the logistical problem of reaching remote opposition factions, that has proved the biggest hurdle in shaping tougher measures against states and groups that condone the use of child soldiers.

A year ago the Security Council pressed for an immediate halt to the use of child soldiers by passing Resolution 1460, which identified 23 armed factions worldwide recruiting children and calculated the number of victims at 300,000. The list has since grown to 54 warring parties in 15 conflicts, mostly in Africa and Asia. Conditions have improved in only a few countries - notably Colombia, Liberia and Burundi - and largely as a result of changed domestic circumstances.

Activists charge that Resolution 1460 was always doomed to fail because it carried no penalties, reflecting a diplomatic reluctance to impose economic sanctions that would be almost impossible to enforce. Another shortcoming is that the resolution does not target those countries, including a number of Security Council members, that provide a political or military lifeline for regimes accused of using child soldiers.

"Action must also be taken against those indirectly involved through tacit support for governments or armed groups, or via the provision of arms and financial assistance," said Kelso, coordinator of the coalition to stop the use of child combatants. "The council should act to end weapons flows to violators and apply targeted sanctions to parties that fail to end their use of child soldiers."

This week the Security Council began thrashing out a new resolution that is expected to raise the tone of the debate, though probably little else. One draft prepared by France would establish a system to monitor the use of children in conflict. Germany is pushing for the inclusion of other rights violations such as rape and sex slavery, which it alleges are often used as weapons of war in combination with murder and mutilation. But the UN again will be hamstrung by a lack of consensus on how to impose punitive measures, partly as a result of its inability to achieve a comprehensive legal platform.

No fewer than six international declarations have been issued on the specific issue of children in conflicts since 1999, culminating in a Child Soldiers Protocol that was signed by 109 countries in 2002 after six years of difficult negotiation. A minimum age of 18 was established for the direct participation of children in hostilities, their compulsory recruitment, enlistment or use in hostilities by non-governmental armed groups - up from 15 years, the previous threshhold.

However, the covenant has been ratified only by a disappointing 67 countries worldwide, including three in Asia - Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Vietnam - giving the UN limited jurisdiction to take punitive action. In addition, it is only an optional protocol to the wide-ranging Convention on the Rights of the Child, which also covers the involvement of children in armed conflict, and hence it cannot be legally enforced.

The United States, one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, has not ratified either the convention or the protocol, though the Senate has voted support for the protocol. The United Kingdom, France, China and Russia, which hold the other four permanent seats, have signed but have not yet ratified the resolution.

One possible reason for Washington's reticence is that it has technically violated the protocol by incarcerating at least three children as "enemy combatants" in a military facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Detained with more than 600 other terrorism suspects after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the children are believed to be aged between 13 and 15, while there is an undetermined number in the 16-18 age bracket. None has been charged with any crime.

With the UN in effect sidelined, the task of implementing Resolution 1460 increasingly has fallen to activists who have even less enforcement ability and are often seen as pursuing their own agendas.

Myanmar, the Asian country on the child soldier blacklist that is arguably most vulnerable to UN sanctions, portrayed itself as a victim of outside political pressures, in an angry retort to the study by the human-rights coalition. "The report, without checking and verification, used second-hand information provided by politically motivated NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to include Tatmadaw Kyi [the government army] in the list," the ruling junta said in a statement to the Security Council.

"The preparation of the report as far as Myanmar was concerned was very political and the discussions were sometimes even acrimonious," the government statement said. "No UN agency in Myanmar has verified this allegation."

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