Marie Claire Article on War Children
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Marie Claire Global Report
The horrors of war affect us all, but modern day conflicts are taking an especially brutal toll on millions of women and children. Where armies once fought far from ordinary people, losses off the battlefields have climbed precipitously in the last few decades. Today, as many as 90 percent of war casualties are civilians [i.e. women and children] because war is fought on a larger scale and new weapons and bombs can kill masive numbers.
Add that to the fact that most conflicts today are no longer between countries but within them, fought on the streets and in the market places, and you see a shocking increase in civilians caught in the crossfire. Women and children account for 28 million of the worlds 35 million refugees; during and for years after wars, they are often left defenceless against hunger, injury, disease, forced military servitude, abuse and sexual exploitation.
It's also a short step from regional hostilities to ethnic cleansing and genocide. When that happens, killing adults is not enough: future generations of the enemy, including the children and those who give birth to them, must also be eliminated - making children first-rank targets. Radio commentators in Rwanda helped incite the genocidal violence against children in the mid 1990's, with one announcer urging: "To kill the big rats, you have to kill the little rats".
In war, governments often ignore human rights violations against women, and some even green light their torture or rape by police or soldiers to fulfil barbaric master plans. Even when women attempt to flee, sexual favours are often the price they must pay to pass smugglers, border guards and, now, as you will learn over the following pages, even UN security forces.
As you read this, 32 different wars are raging in countries around the globe. But peace on earth has always been a very rare commodity: in the last 5,600 years, there have been only 292 years without conflict and 4 billion people are estimated to have perished.
Here's a closer look at women and the wars around the world: the many ways war takes its toll on women, the heroines who stand tall in conflicts, and what you can do to help work towards peace on earth.
How War Hurts Women And Children
Rape and sexual slavery
From Bangladesh to Bosnia, Angola to Vietnam, women and girls have been the victims of systematic gang rape led by soldiers. In Sierra Leone, health workers estimate that as many as 90 per cent of rape survivors test positive for STDs; HIV/AIDS infections are probably raging as well, but a lack of funds prohibits testing.
In the Sudan, women who are considered "good breeders" have been locked up in camps to produce future fighters. Many don't survive. Childbirth complications, more likely in the stressful conditions of war, lead to increased child and maternal mortality. In Sierra Leone, when rebels needed to be on the move, they jumped on the abdomens of women in labour to speed delivery.
Charlotte Lindsey, the 34 year old head of the Women and War Project for the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] believes that the way forward is to teach the soldiers. Eight years ago, she was in a house in Bosnia when a group of fighters burst in, guns blazing. "There were ten of us, and they had us up against the wall" she recalls. "I was terrified, but knew we needed to make a connection with these men. I started talking, hoping my voice wouldn't quaver".
By the time she'd finished, she'd persuaded the intruders to apologise. Lindsey's project now attempts to teach armies and rebels not to rape or torture, through lectures and workshops. "During conflict, people need protection" she says. "That's what we try to provide".
Refugee Camps
Unfortunately, those meant to protect are, in some cases, the ones who abuse. A shocking recent study alleges that a small minority of UN peace keepers, UN aid agencies and humanitarian workers - those meant to help refugees - are forcing girls and women to have sex in "payment" for aid. The joint assessment, issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees [UNHCR] suggests that sexual exploitation of refugee children in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone may be extensive. A UN task force, established to investigate the charges, has admitted that abuse and exploitation in humanitarian crises is a global problem.
Mary, a refugee girl in a camp in Guinea, explained her ordeal: "A peacekeeper asked me to take off my clothes so that he could take [pornographic] pictures. When I asked him to give me money, he told me: "No money for children, only biscuits".
Refugee girls around the world told investigators of being given oil, wheat, ration cards, medicines, transport and education only in exchange for sex with workers employed by humanitarian non governmental organisations [NGO's] "Things are so bad" said a man in a Sierra Leone refugee camp "that if you don't have a wife, a sister or daughter for the NGO workers, it's difficult to obtain any aid".
When the report was leaked in February 2002, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, said new measures, including an increase in the number of female aid workers and a ban on sex between employees and young refugees, would be instituted. "Zero tolerance" he promised. However, a UN official working to combat the problem told Marie Claire that the UN is not taking the problem seriously enough. "The response has been a shrug, as if sex with kids by peacekeepers was a perk of the trade" he said. "We're fighting a culture of sexism that exists even at UN headquarters".
Iain Levine, chief of humanitarian policy and advocacy at UNICEF and co-chair of the National Task Force for Children, set up to monitor institutions working in the field of child welfare, adds: "If you look at recent wars, most of the humanitarian agencies are there for the long haul - ten years or more. We have to tell these people that we are not prepared to tolerate this kind of behaviour".
"Our recommendations will include beneficiaries participating in the monitoring of aid distribution to ensure it reaches the people it should reach" Levine continues. "I believe the UN will also come out with an explicit condemnation of sex with children".
While the UN decides what action to take on a global scale, women like Susan Smith, Save the Children regional director West Africa, are responding to the study in their own areas.
"Save the Children knew that children were very much at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation in the camps, and we've been working for some time to address this" Smith expains. "We're tackling the problems in the area on a number of levels - this includes refresher child-protection training for all our staff and partners, and reviewing the protection arrangement in the camps".
"However it's not just a matter of making sure that staff know that the sexual exploitation of children is unacceptable" she continues. "These kids are in a desperate situation. In order to survive, they have to make a choice between going without food or selling themselves. It's important that those getting aid know what they're entitled to; you're more vulnerable if you don't know what your rights are.
We have been supporting the children to protect themselves. In Sinje camp in Liberia, for example, we have supported children in establishing their own clubs" Smith says. "Club leaders, known as advocates, offer support to each other and the other child members in the community, especially in the areas such as forced and early marriages, child abuse and exploitation"
The difficulty in a refugee victim pressing charges is that they have to go through the same authorities involved in the exploitation. Compounding the problem, humanitarian workers withhold information when they know another agency worker is sexually exploiting a refugee child, the report showed. The code of silence exists because anyone reporting such abuse would be socially isolated and stigmatised, workers told investigators.
Child soldiers
More than 300,000 children - some as young as seven - are soldiers in 30 different conflicts. Small, light arms, such as AK-47 rifles, make it easy to turn children into effective killers; they make obedient soldiers and don't need paying. In Myanmar [formerly Burma] they are used as human shields and minesweepers, while in Sri Lanka, female orphans were trained as Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, called "Birds Of Freedom".
One fourteen year old girl in Sierra Leone recalls: "as a soldier, I've seen people get their hands cut off, a ten year old girl raped and then die, and many men and women burned alive. So many times, I just cried inside my heart - I didn't dare cry out loud".
Women from all over the world are putting their own lives on the line to assist the children. "There's nothing more frightening than negotiating with an eight year old who has an AK-47 pushed in your face" says 32 year old Dr Samantha Nutt who co-founded War Child Canada [www.warchild.ca] four years ago. She was travelling through Burundi, checking out areas that needed aid, when she saw a father and son, aged about seven, being marched into a field by two teenage guards and shot. "I was so angry. It made me question the possibility of ever really having an impact" she says. "But I realised, there are so many war-affected kids depending on what we do. I have a responsibility to try"
Marie de la Soudiere, 59, is the director of a programme that negotiates the freedom of child soldiers in war zones, then rehabilitates them. "These kids worry about their after-life" she explains. "In a transit camp in Liberia, a small boy told me how they were forced to eat the hearts of their victims. All he kept saying was "Pray for me". He was terrified that, when he died, all the people he'd killed would be waiting for him. We're working with communities to accept these kids back" she says. "They were just as victimised as their victims".
Communication and education are key. In 1997, Somalian Starlin Abdi Arush, 45, began to offer deals to young rebels caught up in the country's civil war, which has claimed the lives of Starlin's father and brother. If they gave up their guns, she told them, then she would feed, shelter and educate them. Hungry and injured fighters, many of them with TB and parasites, showed up. Today, her early graduates can read and write, and many have jobs in agriculture or fishing. "Our biggest success was when different factions started calling us, asking us to join the project" says Starlin.
And in Burundi, Fabienne Hara talks to people who won't talk to each other - government forces, militias, rebel commanders - and at times even goes into the jungle to find them. "They don't trust each other; my role is to make them trust me" says the 32 year old French co-director of the International Crisis Groups Africa Programme. "But you can't work toward peace until you know what all the players interests are". Hara was nearly raped by both officials and rebels, and was once held hostage for hours. "I get panic attacks and think I should get out, but, if I left, I'd betray the people who trust me".
Sometimes, the children themselves take the initiative. For Bushra Jawabri, home is a refugee camp in the Palestinian West Bank, where families live eight to a room and water is cut off for four months at a time. While some politicians say the miserable conditions help breed suicide bombers, in Bushra's case, they transformed her into a peace activist. At just seventeen, she was a representative on refugee issues at the Anti Racism Conference in Rome; now aged twenty, Bushra is a scholarship student in New York and recently completed an internship with an organisation teaching peace making skills to teenagers from war zones.
Recently, soldiers attacked her sister Rasha's school. Convinced she was going to die, Rasha wrote a goodbye letter to the family. "Can you imagine how that feels?" Bushra asks. "But my peace activism helps me be optimistic".
Living with the fallout
And when conflicts are over, it's still not the end of the story. In areas where bullets and shells made with depleted uranium tips were expelled, children are being born with birth defects caused by the radiation, according to recent international studies. In Iraq, an estimated 800 tons of uranium shells were fired during the Gulf War, and the expended ammunition is still lying around in villages and water sources.
Other victims are suffering the side effects of living in areas where weapons are destroyed after war. In California, the cancer rate among residents living near the Sierra Army Depot, the US's largest explosion site for obsolete bombs, is 200 per cent higher than the rest of the state.
As we go to press, newspapers are full of reports of a possible conflict with Iraq - more innocent women and childrens lives are at risk. Join our campaign today [see below] to stop this violence worldwide and do your bit for world peace.
Marie Claire has more information on the conflicts around the world within the article [see the November 2002 issue]
What can you do?
Raise money for Save The Children
To find out more about Save the Children, visit www.savethechildren.org.uk
Stop child Soldiers
Sign Amnesty International's petition asking the UK government to initiate an international agreement to raise the age of soldiers in all countries to eighteen. For more information, see www.amnesty.org.uk/childrights/soldier.htm
House an orphaned war victim
Make a donation to Hope and Homes for Children, which provides families and homes for more than 2,500 children orphaned or abandoned due to conflict. Visit www.hopeandhomes.org
Put on a party for War Child
www.warchild.co.uk provides aid to children affected by war. Visit the site to find out how you can raise funds or make a donation. Plus, you can also buy 1 Love [�13.99, B-Unique] a CD supporting the charity, featuring covers of number one hits by the likes of Dido, Starsailor and Oasis, from all major record stores.
Meet others who care
Register your support for women affected by conflict by e-mailing Women in Black at [email protected] - This is a loose network of women who hold weekly silent vigils in protest against war and violence. For information visit www.camwib.org.uk
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