Use of child soldiers “extensive”

There has been extensive use of child soldiers, including some as young as 10 years of age, by both government and opposition armed forces in the Sudanese civil war, which has led to the direct or indirect loss of some two million lives, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers reported on Tuesday. Within Sudan, paramilitaries and other armed groups aligned with the government had a long history of forced recruitment, including that of children under 18 years of age, the Coalition reported in its ‘Global Report on Child Soldiers’. The authorities in Khartoum had also continued their policy of arming militias of the Baqqarah tribes - the murahilin of western Sudan, it said. These militias then carried out raids in southern Sudan, primarily against the Dinka in Bahr al-Ghazal, at the same time as they accompanied and guarded government troop trains to the southern garrison town of Wau, it added. The government has also provided military support to the Ugandan opposition Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group notorious for its abduction, forced recruitment and brutal treatment of children, the report stated. The Sudanese-backed LRA was notorious for forcibly recruiting both boys and girls as soldiers, making them participate in acts of brutality against other children, and for raping or making concubines of many of the girls, it said. “At the camp we were trained to use guns. Those who disobeyed had their ears and fingers cut off,” said Odur Leko, a 14 year-old boy abducted in Kitgum, northern Uganda, by the LRA at the age of eight. “I didn’t want to participate in the killing, but they threatened to shoot me if I refused to do it,” the Coalition quoted him as saying. Armed Sudanese opposition groups, including the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), were also known to have children in their ranks, according to the Coalition. The SPLA had repeatedly assured the UN that it would discontinue the use of child soldiers and, in February this year, cooperated with UNICEF and other agencies in the demobilisation of 3,200 such fighters, it said. However, the SPLA had stated that there were 7,000 more child soldiers to be demobilised, the report added. [for further details, go to: http://www.child-soldiers.org/] The children - ranging in age from 8 to 18 years- were demobilised from military camps run by the SPLA under a personal commitment made by an SPLA commander to UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy in October 2000, the UN agency reported on 27 February. “We knew the critical moment had arrived,” said Dr Sharad Sapra, head of UNICEF’s operations in southern Sudan. “This is the dry season, and that’s when fighting usually erupts,” he said. UNICEF said the children were taken to reception centres in the Lakes [Buhayrat] area, behind the front lines, where local and international NGOs greeted them with medical check-ups and other basic care. They were expected to live in transit centres for four to nine months while a family tracing process took place, it added. [for further details, go to: http://www.unicef.org/newsline/01pr22.htm] The government of Sudan protested against the evacuation, saying that it was conducted secretly in violation of agreements between it and the UN, the child soldiers coalition reported on Tuesday. Khartoum criticised the fact that the children were evacuated from Bahr al-Ghazal (reportedly just ahead of a government dry-season offensive in the area) to the SPLA-controlled town of Rumbek rather than being returned to their families. Questions had also been raised by NGOs as to how many of the children released were actually child soldiers, the Coalition reported. Meanwhile, a reconciliation agreement between the governments of Sudan and Uganda has seen little progress. Although Khartoum claims to have stopped supporting the LRA, it has repeatedly reneged on commitments to secure the release of child soldiers held by the Ugandan faction inside Sudan, the report added.