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7753rd Security Council Meeting: Children and Armed Conflict - Part 1
Speakers Urge Concrete Steps to Tackle Root Causes of Displacement, Violent Extremism
Twenty years after a ground-breaking report on the impact of armed conflict on children brought the issue into focus at the United Nations, young people in hotspots around the globe were still being tortured, maimed and killed, recruited by armed groups and exposed to numerous threats as a result of massive displacement, stressed delegates today as the Security Council held an open debate on the matter.
Many of the more than 70 speakers noted that, despite limited progress — including the conclusion of a number of national action plans to end violations against children — many of the grim realities outlined in the 1996 Graça Machel report continued unabated or had even worsened in the face of a deteriorating global security landscape.
“In places such as Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen, children suffer through a living hell,” said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon as he briefed the Council. Referring to the findings of his latest annual report on the issue (document S/2016/360), he said thousands of Syrian children had been killed since the start of the conflict, and in 2015, Afghanistan had recorded its highest rate of child casualties since 2009. In South Sudan, children continued to pay the heaviest price for leaders’ failure to commit to peace.
Noting that more than half of the world’s refugees were children, he stressed the urgent need to address the root causes of displacement and for an effective response to the violent extremism that often targeted children. “Even wars have rules,” he said in that regard, adding that hospitals and schools must be protected, civilians must be spared and children should not be used to fight.
Leila Zerrougui, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, said many of the impacts of conflicts on young people could not captured by statistics. Children lost parents, were disabled due to curable illnesses and suffered long-term psychological trauma. In April, in Iraq, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh) had executed a 15-year-old by tying him between two cars that were driven in opposite directions. While States faced challenges in tackling violent extremism, security responses that did not comply with international law only inflicted further harm.
Noting that more than 115,000 children associated with parties to conflict had been released as a result of dialogue and actions plans since the Secretary-General’s first report, she nevertheless emphasized that considerable challenges remained. The ability to work together to untangle the most difficult situations would have a decisive impact on millions of children.
Anthony Lake, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), agreed that preventing and ending the recruitment of children was not enough. The United Nations Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism mandated by Council resolution 1612 (2005) continued to help define the full scale of the crisis by providing vital information on the unspeakable atrocities facing children. Using that information, the international community must work with parties to conflict to prevent violations of children’s rights and help shape programmes that could brighten their futures.
In particular, he emphasized the need for focused action in three key areas: explosive weapons and remnants of war; health care; and education. “Our progress to date has shown that the children trapped by conflicts are not beyond our reach,” he said.
The representative of Malaysia, whose country holds the Council presidency for August, said that the international community had developed a number of tools to protect children and give them a voice. While some heartening examples included the progress of the “Children, Not Soldiers” campaign and the deployment of child protection advisers in peacekeeping missions, he stressed that the children and armed conflict agenda must continue to be strengthened and enhanced, adding that “our work is far from over”.
The representative of the United States, noting that Member States might not agree with everything pointed out in the Secretary-General’s report, stressed that they should nevertheless maintain their support for the United Nations work to protect children. This year’s report provided a “bleak but unsurprising” picture of the worsening situation of children affected by armed conflict, she said, noting in particular the massive recruitment of children by ISIL and the use of siege tactics in Syria by the Assad regime.
Syria’s delegate said that, at long last, and with some reluctance, the Secretary-General’s report had addressed the recruiting, torture and killing of children by ISIL and Al-Nusrah over the past five years. It did not, however, deal with the main reason for the suffering of Syrian children, he said, citing the Wahhabi ideology as consolidated by the House of Saud. The report also failed to mention the suffering of children in refugee camps in countries neighbouring Syria, economic measures imposed on Syrian people and their children or the suffering of children in the occupied Syrian Golan.
The representative of Sri Lanka recalled that his country had witnessed the horror of child soldiers used as combatants by non-State armed groups. Called the “Baby Brigade”, 50 per cent of its members were girls, many of them forcibly taken from their schools. Describing efforts to reintegrate child combatants when the conflict ended in May 2009, he said such initiatives had led the United Nations to delist Sri Lanka from Annex II of the Secretary-General’s report on child combatants in 2012.
In a similar vein, many speakers welcomed the recent announcement by Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) group in which it had agreed to end child recruitment. Welcoming the move — which was part of the peace deal ending Colombia’s decades-long conflict — the representative of Colombia said the FARC had released around 6,000 children.
Throughout the debate, several speakers also recalled that, after some controversy, a Saudi Arabia-led coalition in Yemen had been excluded from the annexes to the Secretary-General’s report. A number of speakers expressed concern that pressure had been exerted in that case to avoid international scrutiny.
In that regard, the representative of Saudi Arabia said his country had responded to the call of Yemen’s President and people following the 2015 coup, and that the coalition had been set up in strict compliance with the United Nations Charter and international law. Stressing that the coalition forces were not holding any children in Yemen, he said the coalition’s operations were subject to periodic review to avoid any adverse effects on the civilian population and that a group had been set up to investigate all relevant allegations.
On that matter Mr. Ban said that he had strong concerns about the protection of Yemeni children and that the United Nations would closely monitor the situation on the ground as the review continued. “Let me be clear: the report and its annexes may cause discomfort, but that is not a goal in itself. Our aim is to protect children in danger by ensuring concrete change.” he said.
Also participating were the representatives of France, Egypt, China, Spain, Venezuela, Ukraine, Russian Federation, Angola, New Zealand, Senegal, Japan, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Iran, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, Thailand (on behalf of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), Switzerland, Israel, Guatemala, Slovenia, Denmark, Lithuania (also on behalf of Estonia and Latvia), Yemen, Liechtenstein, Croatia, Kuwait, Poland, Pakistan, Morocco, Australia, Argentina, Netherlands, Austria, Cambodia, Belgium, Indonesia, Portugal, Panama, United Arab Emirates, Botswana, Philippines, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Canada (on behalf of the Group of Friends of Children and Armed Conflict), Greece, Sudan, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Brazil, Iraq, Chile, Turkey, Jordan, Myanmar, Viet Nam, Qatar and Azerbaijan, as well as the State of Palestine, Holy See and the European Union.
The meeting began at 10:08 a.m. and ended at 6:48 p.m.
