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Conference On Child Soldiers Held In Amman
by Tareq Ayyoub
AMMAN, April 8 (IslamOnline) - At least 300,000 children are working as soldiers in over 30 countries worldwide. Speakers at a conference inaugurated in the Jordanian capital on Sunday challenged the world community to end this phenomenon.
The participants in the three-day conference, sponsored by UNICEF and the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSUCS), said children are compelled to join local militia and the armed forces in countries involved in civil wars or regional conflicts.
"Many of these children are seen by many as terrorists, heroes, martyrs or even criminals, but the fact is there are merely children who were denied their basic right," Rory Mungovan, coordinator of CSUCS told IslamOnline ahead of the meeting.
"The use of children as soldiers is like the use of landmines or chemical or biological weapons: simply unacceptable under any circumstances," Mungovan said.
He added that children are involved one way or another in countries like Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and the Kurdish parts of Iraq and Iran, and forced to work in armed groups or paramilitary pro-government militia in these countries.
"There is a global consensus that the use of children as soldiers must stop. Children need to learn how to read and write, not how to kill. They are entitled to play with toys, not with deadly weapons," Ibrahim D. Fall, UNICEF Regional Director for the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, told the conference.
"Children have the right to be surrounded with love and friends, not to learn how to hate and make enemies. They have the right to be held in the nurturing arms of their parents, not in the unforgiving environment of military camps," Fall added.
A report on recruitment of children in conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa indicates that the region has not been exempted from this phenomenon, especially during conflicts between Iraq and Iran, with hundreds of thousands of Iranian children driven to work as soldiers during the eight-year war, and in Lebanon.
The civil war in Sudan recorded the worst example for the use of children in armed conflicts, the report said.
The government and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement Army recruited children during a war between the group and various Sudanese governments, with thousands of children under the age of 12 recruited by both sides.
In northern Iraq, Kurdish groups have been recruiting children into their ranks, while political unrest in Algeria has led to the use of children by some armed groups fighting the government hitting the northern African state since early 1990s, the report added.
According to available information, most child soldiers are aged between 15 and 18. Many are recruited from the age of 10, and sometimes even younger.
In many countries, girls who are used as soldiers are at risk of rape, sexual harassment and abuse, a statement of the CSUCS said.
The problem is most critical in Africa, Asia and some Latin American countries.
Some of the children are used forcibly, others are driven into the armed forces by poverty, alienation and discrimination. And many children join armed groups because of their own experience of abuse at the hands of state authorities, the statement added.
Last year, the Organization of the Islamic Conference approved an article on "Child Care and protection" calling for the non-involvement of child refugees in armed conflicts or other actions which may endanger their personal safety.
On May 2000, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by consensus the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict.
The convention defines a child as any person under the age of 18, however, it set the lower age of 15 in relation to military recruitment and participation of children in armed conflict, while calling on states recruiting under 18 to give priority to older recruits.
The Optional Protocol corrected this and raised the age to 18 as the minimum limit for direct involvement in hostilities.
We should "recommend the ratification and compliance with the Optional Protocol to the convention of the Rights of the Child," Fall told the conference.
"This includes several protective measures for children. Most importantly, it calls upon state parties and armed groups to prohibit forced recruitment and the use of persons who have not attained the age of 18 years," he added.
"UNICEF encourages states to set 18 also as the minimum age for voluntarily recruitment into the armed forces, when ratifying the Optional Protocol," Fall said.
He indicated that out of the 79 countries that have signed the protocol, only Jordan, Morocco and Turkey are from the Middle East and North Africa region.
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