Diplomat criticises rebels on children's rights

A Sudanese government delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, Ilham Ibrahim Muhammad Ahmad, on Tuesday urged the international community to condemn the actions of rebel groups, mainly in the south of the country, where, she said, "children are kidnapped and forced to fight or, if they refuse, used as [human] shields". "Global actors should exert pressure on rebel movements and spare no efforts to bring them to the negotiating table," Ahmad told the Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) of the General Assembly. Kidnapped children should be released and reintegrated into their communities, she added, according to a UN press statement. The Sudanese representative asked if the office of the United Nations Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, had a mechanism for dealing with armed rebel groups. The Sudanese government has itself been the subject of repeated criticism on the issue of abductions and forced displacement by militia groups aligned with it in southern Sudan - notably Arab raiders of the Baqqarah tribe, known as the Murahilin - and has promised to do what it can to combat the practice. An independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Canadian workers' and human rights groups last week also reported on alleged forcible recruitment of young teenagers into the government's armed forces, and their use to provide security in areas of oil development, and to attack their own people. Both the government of Sudan and rebel groups have violated human rights, including those of children, in the continuing civil war, according to the US-based Human Rights Watch in its World Report 2001. [see http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/africa/sudan.html] At the General Assembly on Tuesday, Ahmad also told the General Assembly committee that Sudan had created a National Programme of Action to implement the tenets of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, especially on issues such as health and education. The UNICEF regional representative, Tom McDermott, who visited Sudan last week, said afterwards that the country should step up its efforts to provide education and immunisation for children throughout the country. Since April 2001, the vaccination campaign in Sudan had been stalled as a result of the inability to negotiate access with warring parties, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported to the General Assembly on Tuesday. McDermott praised the government for establishing a unit in the Ministry of Education to deal with the education of girls, and for guaranteeing the salaries of primary school teachers, but appealed for more effort to be made to improve basic primary education, and for a special curriculum on HIV/AIDS to be integrated into the school system. Sudan has a total adult literacy rate in the region of 57 percent (with male and female rates 67 and 47 respectively), a gross primary enrolment ratio of about 48 percent (male) and 43 percent (female), and a gross secondary school enrolment of some 21 percent (male) and 19 percent (female), according to UNICEF's State of the World's Children report 2001. Oil revenues provided new opportunities for Sudan, according to McDermott, who called on the government to use them to increase access to education. He also urged government officials to focus on educating "every child," because education was the cornerstone of a country's development. "Children can form the basis for lasting peace in Sudan, and I urged the government ministers I met to ensure that from the new revenue and other emerging opportunities in Sudan, they not only give priority to the social sectors but actually put children in very concrete terms," he added.