Casualities of war: Child soldiers and the law

Hearing before theSenate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law

Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Dirksen Senate Office Building, Room 226

Good morning, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you for inviting me to testify at this important hearing. I also want to thank you for your ongoing leadership and commitment to protect children, both here in the United States and abroad.

My colleagues on the panel already have provided a wealth of information on the topic of child soldiers and illuminated both the legal and very personal impact that this issue has around the world. My goal today is to provide the committee with the perspective of an operational humanitarian organization on this topic, including an overview of our programs and our challenges. In addition, I would like to provide a few thoughts as an advocate here in Washington, D.C.

First, let me profile the organization that I represent. World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization. Founded in 1950, World Vision today is the largest, privately-funded, international humanitarian organization based in the United States, and one of the leading nongovernmental organizations in the world. We have 23,000 staff serving the poor in nearly 100 countries.

In 2006, through emergency relief, community development and child sponsorship programs, World Vision provided hope and assistance to more than 100 million people in 97 countries.

As a child focused organization, it is imperative and inescapable that we address several forms of child exploitation, including children used in combat. Our work with "child soldiers" has focused on prevention, demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration of child soldiers.

It is an exceedingly difficult problem to address. Many of these children are forcibly recruited by either rebel groups or state-run military organizations. Many are exploited as a result of their poverty, wherein desperation and the reward of food draw them into military service. All are vulnerable. Children suffer higher mortality, disease and injury rates in combat situations than adults. The lasting effects of war and abuse may also remain with them long after the shooting stops.

Both girls and boys are often stigmatized and traumatized by their experience, as many are forced to commit atrocities against their own families and communities. And sometimes they are left with neither family connections nor skills to allow them to transition successfully into productive adult lives.

Specific World Vision interventions usually include:

• Assessing the physical and emotional condition of former child soldiers and providing medical attention and psycho-social support;
• Providing protective shelter where children can meet with other children to experience their grief and loss together;
• Coordinating with other agencies for family tracing and reunification;
• Raising awareness in communities about the need to protect children from exploitation;
• Sensitizing communities for child reintegration and follow-up on children who have been reintegrated;
• Providing educational and skills training opportunities;
• Addressing the specific needs for girls who have been affected by armed conflict (i.e. sexual abuse and the consequences, including pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases);
• Advocating with warring parties to urge peace and the release of child soldiers;
• Organizing and training children to become their own community advocates for peace.

Prevention is key.

One of our strongest programs is located in northern Uganda. In Gulu, a northern district of Uganda, World Vision runs the Children of War Program, which includes a counseling center for former child soldiers and adults who were abducted as children. It is the largest, most well-established rehabilitation center in all of Uganda. Opened in 1995, the Children of War Center provides formerly abducted children with temporary shelter, AIDS education, food, medical treatment, psycho-social counseling, vocational training, spiritual nurture and facilitates a smooth reunion of the children with their families. More than 15,000 children and adults have passed through the center.

Let me give you an idea of the kinds of situation we work with.

You are likely aware of the 21-year conflict in Northern Uganda. This conflict has terrorized the region, destroyed the lives of an entire generation of children and hindered overall development of the country. Notably, according to Human Rights Watch and the Coalition to Prevent Child Soldiers, the northern Uganda conflict today has one of the highest rates of child soldier usage in the world.

For the past 21 years, the children of northern Uganda have been made pawns in a deadly game of war, between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda. Well more than 25,000 children have been used as child soldiers in this conflict.

The face of this war in northern Uganda is children. More than 80 percent of the rebel “Lord’s Resistance Army” is made up of abducted children. There are allegations that the Ugandan Army (or UPDF – Ugandan People’s Defense Force) has used child soldiers, as well. For years, there has been mass hostage taking by the LRA, where tens of thousands of children have been abducted and forced to become soldiers — to become “kill or be killed” mercenaries.

And in the case of girls, they have double duty: serving as both soldiers and sex slaves for senior adult commanders. In many cases, they have been forced to bear several children for those who repeatedly rape them.

This environment has resulted in stories like that of “William,” and 11-year-old boy in Uganda who was forced to kill five people as part of his indoctrination by the LRA, which he served for two years. The first time he killed someone, he, along with other children, were forced to bite to death one child who had attempted to escape from the LRA. After the victim died of blood loss and shock, William and others were then required to swallow the dead child’s blood. It was a warning to him and to the others not to try to escape, or they would face the same torture.

I also want to tell you about Grace Akallo, a former child soldier who testified on behalf of World Vision before the U.S. House of Representatives last year. In October 1996, the LRA attacked St. Mary’s College, a girls' boarding school in Aboke Town, northern Uganda. They abducted 139 girls — including Grace. She was 15-years-old at the time. She and the other girls captured with her were trained to assemble and disassemble, clean and use guns. The LRA and northern Sudanese government soldiers used them as slave labor. Grace and her classmates were forcibly given to senior LRA commanders as so-called "wives” and repeatedly raped. Five of Grace’s friends died in captivity, many are infected with HIV, and, eleven years later, two of her friends are still held hostage by the LRA.

Both William and Grace eventually escaped and received support.

As documented in our report, Pawns of Politics: Children, Conflict and Peace in Northern Uganda, this 21-year war has cost an estimated $100 million dollars per year, and has more than doubled HIV rates in surveyed, war-affected areas. Unofficial rates for Uganda are at around 5 percent, but our research in certain areas shows that HIV rates are at 11.9 percent — more than double the national average. [In these areas, 69 percent of deaths are due to HIV, and not direct conflict.]

With the support of the United Nations and countries from the Africa region, peace talks are now underway between the warring parties. People are hopeful that this may lead to peace, but after 21 years of death, destruction and broader regional instability in southern Sudan and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, major donors need to maintain an active presence and support for these talks. In particular, all parties involved have requested the presence of the United States at the talks, to ensure success.

Uganda is just one chapter in this story.

Unfortunately, similar, situations exist around the world. Today, an estimated 250,000 children are serving in armed conflict in 20 countries around the world. These “child soldiers” include boys and girls, sometimes as young as eight years old, serving in government armies, government-linked militias, and armed opposition groups. They serve in all aspects of contemporary warfare — as spies, messengers, guards, cooks, porters, security officers and, too often, as front-line combatants.

The challenges for NGOs working on this issue in the field are plenty:

• Limited influence in getting children demobilized;
• Implementing programs in conflict settings;
• Treating deep psychological trauma and significant physical wounds of victims;
• Preventing children from “re-recruitment;”
• Reunification of children with their families or communities where they have forcibly committed atrocities.

More specifically, challenges for reintegration include:

• Continued conflict and instability. In places like northern Uganda, children are returning back to insecure settings where they were initially abducted. Therefore, they are vulnerable to re-abduction and re-recruitment;
• Lack of educational and vocational opportunities for returning child soldiers also makes these children vulnerable to re-recruitment. Many returning child soldiers resort to joining gangs or getting involved in criminal activity, prostitution or survival sex -- wherein countries with high HIV prevalence, such risky behavior further increases the spread of the virus;
• Girls who give birth to children as a result of child soldiering have a particularly difficult time reintegrating back into their communities, which makes their recovery more difficult. They are frequently rejected by their families because they are viewed as "defiled;”
• Lack of adequate funding for psycho-social programs and community follow up.

All of this occurs with the backdrop of violent conflict.

While organizations like World Vision can continue to work to protect and rehabilitate children, our ability to mitigate or resolve conflict is limited. We can stop the bleeding and help heal physical and emotional wounds when the children are in our care, but we can’t stop the war or change the policies of the governments or organizations that use children in combat.

From our perspective, the international community, especially world leaders such as the U.S., can and should play a more engaged role through diplomatic efforts, funding programs, assisting peace negotiations and leveraging resources.

Over the years, the U.S. Government has provided millions in program funding, ratified treaties and passed relevant resolutions and bills. For example:

• The United States is a party to international treaties banning the use of child soldiers, including the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict (ratified by the U.S. in 2002) and ILO Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (ratified in 1999).
• The United States has enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000.
• Both chambers of the United States Congress have made clear their position on this issue in recent years as articulated in a series of resolutions, “Expressing condemnation of the use of children as soldiers and the belief that the United States should support and, where possible, lead efforts to establish and enforce international standards designed to end this abuse of human rights” (S. CON. RES. 72, H. CON. RES. 348, H. CON. RES. 209, H. CON. RES. 309, H. CON. RES. 202).
• Section 502B(a)(3) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (22 U.S.C. 2304(a)(3)) provides that ‘‘the President is directed to formulate and conduct international security assistance programs of the United States in a manner which will promote and advance human rights and avoid identification of the United States, through such programs, with governments which deny to their people internationally recognized human rights and fundamental freedoms, in violation of international law or in contravention of the policy of the United States as expressed in this section or otherwise.’’

Most recently, actually last week, the United States Senate, under your leadership Mr. Chairman, introduced another piece of legislation that provides a key element of a strategy to combat this problem.

As you know, while many child soldiers are found among armed non-state actors, the State Department reports that governments in 10 countries are implicated in child soldier use. Some of these governments recruit children into their own armed forces, while others are directly linked to militias that use children in warfare.

The U.S. government provides military assistance to nine of them, ranging from small amounts of funding for military training to hundreds of millions in weapons, training and military financing.

I’m confident that most taxpayers would agree that U.S. tax dollars should not be used to support the exploitation of children as soldiers. Moreover, U.S. weapons should not end up in the hands of children.

You and Senator Brownback have introduced the Child Soldier Prevention Act of 2007 (s. 1175) to encourage governments to disarm, demobilize and rehabilitate child soldiers from government forces and government-supported paramilitaries by restricting various forms of U.S. military assistance provided to these governments until they end any involvement in this practice.

The bill takes into account that there may be circumstances that require flexibility in the implementation of this bill in order to allow for strategic military engagement or diplomatic positioning. Therefore, the bill allows that countries that take concrete steps to demobilize child soldiers be eligible for U.S. assistance solely for the professionalization of their armed forces for up to two years before any additional prohibitions on assistance would be imposed. The bill provides the President with the authority to waive prohibitions if he determines that such a waiver is in the best interests of the United States. Moreover, the bill encourages the United States to work with the international community to bring to justice armed rebel groups that kidnap children for use as soldiers.

Rightly, this bill is directed at national governments that receive U.S. military assistance to help them professionalize their forces and to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are not used to finance the exploitation of children in armed conflict.

The legislation is in alignment with the standards that the United States has accepted for its own armed forces under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, which the United States ratified in 2002. It is also in our own national security interest to reduce the incidence of child soldiers in the world: our commanders do not want their troops to confront the specter of an armed child in a combat situation.

This bill will both underscore the importance of the issue within United States foreign policy and provide concrete means to help countries end their reliance on children as soldiers.

We at World Vision believe this bill will provide strong incentives for foreign governments to end any involvement in the recruitment and use of child soldiers. It also encourages the United States to expand funding to rehabilitate former child soldiers and work with the international community to bring to justice rebel leaders that kidnap children for use as soldiers.

Mr. Chairman, I applaud you for your leadership on this very important piece of legislation and on human rights issues around the world. We at World Vision stand ready to work with you on our common goals.

In addition to these efforts, I would like to make an appeal for the following:

1. High-level Engagement by the U.S. Government: Members of Congress, the Administration and international leaders must use their political influence to help end the use of child soldiers around the world.
2. Commit U.S. leadership to mobilizing the international community in order to put global pressure on combatants to protect children and to end conflict.
3. Provide more resources to help people suffering because of conflict.

Thank you. I look forward to your questions.