Children In Sudan Essay, Research Paper
Children of Sudan
Children who escape from rebel captivity are in poor shape: they are usually in lice-ridden rags, covered with sores, scarred from beatings and bullet wounds. According to World Vision’s Robby Muhumuza, the children arrive at trauma counseling centers “sick, malnourished, with low appetite. They have guilt feelings, are depressed and with low self-esteem . . . . They have swollen feet, rough skin, chest infections . . . they tend to be aloof . . . with little confidence in themselves or others. They tend to lapse into absentmindedness as well as swift mood changes.”Many of the children–especially the girls, who are routinely given to rebel leaders as “wives”–also have sexually transmitted diseases: “They arrive with gonorrhea, syphilis or sores, skin rash and complaints of abdominal pain and backache.” At World Vision in Gulu, 70 to 80 percent of the children newly arriving at the center test positive for at least one sexually transmitted disease. Some of the girls are pregnant, while others, who tested negative for pregnancy, have stopped having their menstrual periods because of malnutrition and stress. The trauma counseling centers do not test the children for HIV, reasoning that after their experiences in the bush, the children are not yet psychologically ready to be told that they may have contracted a fatal illness. But with HIV infection rates of 25 percent in parts of Gulu and Kitgum, it is overwhelmingly likely that many of the children–especially the girls–have become infected.Counselors and children’s advocates criticize the Uganda People’s Defense Force for not providing escaped children with adequate medical care while the children are in UPDF control. “They don’t always give them treatment right away,” says Richard Oneka, a counselor. “Sometimes by the time they reach us, they’ve been with the UPDF for weeks without seeing a doctor.”The Uganda People’s Defense Force also sometimes brings recently escaped children to appear at public rallies, to drum up popular support for the fight against the rebels. This practice, too, is sharply criticized by children’s advocates: “They display the children, and read out their names, which only increases the likelihood of rebel reprisals against the child or his family,” explains Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus. “Also, they give details on how the child escaped. The rebels come to hear of it, and that makes it hard for other children to escape. The army is just using the children.”In its 1996 report to the U.N.Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Ugandan government affirmed its general commitment “to improve the lives of . . . child soldiers” and its “special concern” for children abducted by rebels. Nonetheless, the Uganda Child Rights NGO Network (UCRNN) has been critical of the government’s response to the crisis in the north, noting that while the Museveni government provided “special services” for children who were caught up in civil wars of the early 1980s (when Museveni’s guerrilla army fought the Obote and Okello regimes), “children caught up in the armed rebellion in northern Uganda since 1987 have not received adequate support from the government.” According to UCRNN, “no government programmes or resources have been identified” for children abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. UCRNN has called upon the government to “take concrete measures to address the needs of children caught up in armed conflict” and to “establish adequate responses for the long-term support of these children.”Some of the children who escape from the rebels go immediately home to their villages, and some return to their boarding schools, but many end up staying, for a time, at the trauma centers operated by World Vision or the Gulu Save the Children Organization (GUSCO). Conditions in the centers are poor: too many children in small huts and tents, too few trained counselors, and not enough for the children to do. At one center, children are taught basic skills like carpentry, tailoring and bicycle repair, but at the others, the children spend much of their time just sitting around, playing card games or staring into space. But at least the centers feel safe to the children: at the centers, they are surrounded by other children who have gone through similar experiences, and cared for by supportive, non-judgmental adults. This is not always the case outside of the centers: according to Robby Muhumuza, children who return home sometimes find that other families with young relatives still in captivity are “jealous of those who have returned.” Some people also blame the children for rebel atrocities. Those villagers who had themselves suffered at the hands of Lord’s Resistance Army rebels are sometimes “antagonistic, labeling the children ‘rebels.’” Occasionally, children face physical threats from community members who identify them as perpetrators of atrocities. For girls, in a culture which regards non-marital sex as “defilement,” the difficulties are even greater: reviled for being “rebels,” the girls may also find themselves ostracized for having been “wives.” They fear “shame, humiliation and rejection by their relatives and possible future husbands.” They may suffer “continual taunts from boys and men [who say they are] used products that have lost their taste. For many children, lack of community acceptance is the least of their troubles. “Many of these children have parents who were killed during their abductions,” explains World Vision’s Charles Wotman. “Others have families, but they have been displaced, and no one knows where they are.” Children without families worry that they will be unable to support themselves. Even those children with supportive homes and communities fear leaving the centers, because of the danger of being re-abducted and killed.
Relevant International Humanitarian Standards
The human rights abuses of the Lord’s Resistance Army shock the conscience, and violate the most elementary principles of international humanitarian law. The LRA’s abuses of children’s rights are both too numerous and too self-evident to make an exhaustive list of relevant international human rights standards necessary. Most pertinently, however, the LRA’s actions violate the provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which lays out the minimum humanitarian rules applicable to internal armed conflicts:
In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, or mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) taking of hostages;
(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.
Since Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is binding on “each Party to the conflict”–that is, it is binding on both governmental and non-governmental forces–the Lord’s Resistance Army currently stands in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.
Currently, the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child establish fifteen as the minimum age at which states that have ratified these treaties may recruit children into their armed forces. Since the Lord’s Resistance Army is a nongovernmental force, it is not a party to these treaties (although it remains bound by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, cited above). Nonetheless, these treaties establish clear principles of customary international law with regard to the use of children as combatants. Serious violations of the rules and customs of war, including the forced recruitment of children into armed groups, should be punished by law. The 1996 United Nations Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children documented the tragedy of child soldiers throughout the world; as Graca Machel, who headed the study, says, “War violates every right of the child–the right to life, the right to grow up in a family environment, the right to health, the right to survival and full development and the right to be nurtured and protected, among others.”In the study, Graca Machel also recommended that the minimum age for recruitment and participation in armed forces be raised from fifteen to eighteen.
It is Human Rights Watch’s position that no one under the age of eighteen should be recruited (either voluntarily or involuntarily) into any armed forces, whether governmental or nongovernmental in nature.Abducted children are not the only victims of the conflict in the north. The conflict, which has now persisted for over a decade, has taken the lives of thousands of civilians of all ages. Some have been killed by the rebels during raids; others have been caught in the crossfire between rebels and government soldiers. While at times several weeks go by with few rebel attacks, during other periods, the death toll is astounding: during a single two-week period in July 1996, for instance, violence took the lives of forty soldiers, thirty-two rebels and 225 civilians. Between January 6 and January 10, 1997, 400 civilians were slaughtered during a rebel attack in Kitgum.Northern Uganda today faces an acute humanitarian crisis. The two northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum, the homeland of the Acholi people, have been hardest hit: relief agencies estimate that over 240,000 people are currently displaced from their homes and villages, while some local officials estimate that the figure is as high as two million displaced people. In Kitgum, nearly half of the displaced people are children, and more than a third of those children have been orphaned by the war. The infrastructure in Gulu and Kitgum is in a state of collapse. The constant danger of land mines and rebel ambushes has made many of the region’s few roads unsafe for travel. Rebel attacks destroyed thousands of homes. Agriculture has come to a standstill in parts of the region, since the insecurity has forced people to flee their homes and abandon their fields. Education, too, has stopped in many places. The rebels target schools and teachers, and in the last year, in Gulu alone, more than seventy-five schools have been burnt down by the rebels, and 215 teachers have been killed. Many more teachers have been abducted or have fled the region. An estimated 60,000 school-aged children have been displaced, and during 1996, the number of functioning schools in Gulu fell from 199 to sixty-four.Attacks on schools are an efficient way for the rebels to abduct many children at once. In October 1996, for instance, the rebels raided St. Mary’s, a Catholic girls’ boarding school in the town of Aboke, in Apac district. The rebels arrived in the middle of the night, and entered the school through a window. They destroyed a of school vehicle, ransacked the school clinic, attempted to burn down a number of school buildings, and abducted 139 girls, aged mostly fifteen to seventeen. The scale of the Aboke abductions was unusual, as was the rebel incursion into Apac, but the rebel tactic of raiding schools is typical, and has gravely disrupted the north’s educational system.The health care system in the north, always rudimentary, has almost collapsed. Many of those who are wounded in the fighting receive little or no medical attention; as a result, figures giving the number of dead and wounded are almost certainly too low, since many deaths and injuries never come to the attention of the authorities. Rebel raids on clinics and dispensaries have diminished the store of medicines available, and the instability has caused many health workers to flee. This has disrupted most basic non-emergency services, including immunization campaigns. Officially, there are thirty rural health units in Gulu, but as of May 1997, only fourteen remained in operation.
The results are predictable: by almost any health care indicator, Gulu and Kitgum lag far behind other parts of Uganda. At the end of 1995, for instance, the infant mortality rate in Gulu was 172 per thousand live births, compared to eighty per thousand live births in Kampala. Most estimates suggest that the HIV infection rate in the region hovers at around 25 percent of the population. And AIDS deaths compound all of the region’s other problems, further straining health care resources, rendering immune-compromised people more vulnerable to other diseases, and leaving still more children orphaned.The health crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the government policy of encouraging civilians to leave rural areas and move to “protected camps” near Uganda People’s Defense Force military installations. The rationale behind the protected camps is straightforward: by concentrating the civilian population in a few well-defined areas, the army hopes both to simplify the task of protecting people from rebel attacks and make it harder for the rebels to find food by raiding villages. But in practice, the protected camps have been, at best, a mixed blessing for the internally displaced people of Gulu and Kitgum: tens of thousands of them thronged to the camps, only to find that virtually no provision had been made for sanitation or sustenance. In the protected camp at Pabbo, in Gulu district, for instance, a displaced population of over 30,000 relies for water on only two boreholes, one of which was not functional as of May. The likelihood of any improvement in the situation is minimal, because the district lacks the staff and equipment to fix breakdowns: according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, “most of the [district's] field crew were laid off in the recent restructuring exercise [and] all the vehicles attached to the water dept. in this district are broken down except one which is moving but in very bad mechanical condition.” Along with the paltry water supply in Pabbo, no latrines had been created for the camp. And Pabbo is not unusual; according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, “[T]he whole situation is pathetic . . . . Suffering in long queues, and swamps of flies over the stinking garbage and human excreta is the order of the day in most camps.”Unsurprisingly, limited water, poor sanitary facilities and minimal provision of medical care in the protected camps has led to thousands of deaths each month. Ten of the twenty-four camps in Gulu district are situated in areas with no health care facilities at all, and a recent survey in three of the camps found that 41.9 percent of the children were malnourished. Epidemics of measles, malaria and dysentery kill off many of the weakest in the camps In Pabbo alone, there were more than four thousand deaths during the month of February 1997 (more recent figures are not available). According to Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus, civilians frequently complain of harassment and human rights abuses by the Ugandan People’s Defense Force, including robbery, rape and torture. Since the focus of our investigation was on the abduction of children, we were not able to look into these charges, but we asked military officials if they were aware of them. Lieutenant Bantirinza Shaban, the public relations officer for the UPDF in Gulu, confirmed that he was aware of such allegations, and attributed any such incidents to “communication problems” stemming from “ethnic difficulties and language differences.”Colonel James Kazini, commander of the UPDF Fourth Division, had a different explanation: he attributed such abuses to the Acholi soldiers, saying, “If anything, it is local Acholi soldiers causing the problems. It’s the cultural background of the people here: they are very violent. It’s genetic.” He expressed his regret that Ugandan law prohibits summary justice against soldiers found to have committed abuses: “We used to have field court martials, and try and sentence them right in the market place. We used to just kill them. But now the president does not allow it . . . soldiers accused of misbehaving are taken to the police and charged.”
IV. THE HISTORY AND CAUSES OF THE CONFLICT
To think about it, you feel a headache. – Sister Bruna Barollo, Camboni Sisters
But where is the world? Why do they not like the Acholi? What have we done that the world should just watch us suffer?- Andres Banya, Acholi Development Association
During our stay in Uganda, we were struck repeatedly by the contrast between north and south. The international press has been full of glowing reports on the prosperity and stability Uganda has enjoyed under President Museveni, and the atmosphere in Kampala appears to bear this out: the streets are bustling, there is construction everywhere, and Kampala enjoys a reputation as one of Africa’s safest cities. From the air, the south is a blanket of green farms, plantations and forests, with small houses dotting the landscape. Flying north, the scene gradually changes. Houses become mixed with huts, and ultimately give way to huts entirely. In Gulu, the observer sees a landscape filled with burnt huts, deserted compounds, and abandoned fields. There is virtually no traffic on the few roads.It’s only a four-hour drive from Kampala to Gulu or Kitgum, but it might as well be a thousand miles. Cultural and linguistic differences ensure that residents of southern Uganda have few social reasons to venture north, and the relative under-development of the far north makes it unlikely that southerners will visit Gulu or Kitgum for commercial reasons. The danger of mines and ambushes along northern roads further diminishes southerners’ incentive to visit their Acholi compatriots, and the lack of telecommunications infrastructure in the north makes even phone contact rare. As journalist Cathy Watson observes, “There’s no Acholi elite in the south, and so there’s no one to put the north on the agenda or keep it in people’s minds. The north just slides off the map.” These factors, in combination, mean that southern Ugandans often have little awareness of the atrocities and the humanitarian crisis in the north.The apparent senselessness of the conflict in the north exacerbates the problem. Although they are ostensibly dedicated to the military overthrow of the Museveni government, the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army instead seem to concentrate on attacking the civilian population. Indeed, the rebels prey largely upon the Acholi people, the very ethnic group to which most of them belong. To many southerners, then, the conflict is not only distant but incomprehensible: it is Acholi slaughtering Acholi, for no discernible reason.To the people of the north, however, and especially to the Acholi, the rebels are much more than a distant and incomprehensible nuisance. With hundreds and sometimes thousands dying each month, with more children abducted every day, with crops destroyed, homes looted and burnt, and epidemic diseases prevelent in the through the protected camps, the conflict has devastated the region in an unprecedented way. This lends a certain urgency to the problem of understanding the roots and sources of the conflict. Bewilderment about the conflict is understandable: during our investigation we heard many tentative theories about why the conflict continues, but few people were willing to hazard a definitive explanation, and the rebels themselves are a black box. We heard stories and counter-stories, some more persuasive than others, but none ultimately satisfying. This, however, does not mean that there is no reason for the violence; it instead suggests that the reasons are many and deep, and fully disentangling them may not be possible in the end.To the limited extent that the conflict has received foreign press coverage, the media has tended to present the Lord’s Resistance Army in straightforward, if disapproving, terms: to the media, the Lord’s Resistance Army is a group of militant Christian fundamentalists who seek to restore a government based upon the Ten Commandments. The New York Times calls them “blood-thirsty . . . self-styled revolutionaries and Christian fundamentalist rebels.” CNN calls them “a Christian cult . . . led by a former Catholic named Kony.” The Guardian calls Kony a “Christian fanatic. This presents us with a familiar story; after all, the violence of “religious fanatics” appears, at first glance, to offer an explanation for the violence in northern Uganda. But as the children’s testimonies demonstrate, to view the Lord’s Resistance Army as “Christian fundamentalists” is a misleading oversimplification.As Roger Winter of the U.S. Committee for Refugees notes, “too often outsiders assume that instability and violence in this region of Africa are endemic, as if they were part of the natural disorder.” But such journalistic oversimplifications promote a kind of passivity in the face of horrors: if Africa, or the Acholi, are just “like that,” then efforts to resolve the conflict are inevitably in vain. Such an assumption, moreover, does a great disservice to the many thousands who suffer at the hands of the Lord’s Resistance Army.