PRESS CONFERENCE BY COALITION TO STOP USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS

At a Headquarters press conference today, the London-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSC) released a 195-page report detailing worldwide use of children in situations of conflict.  The 195-page report, titled “Child Soldiers 1379 Report”, was also offered to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to use in his report to the Security Council when it meets on 20 November to discuss children and armed conflict.

Launching the report, Casey Kelso, CSC Coordinator, and Kathy Vandergrift of the Coalition’s steering committee, told correspondents that the report’s name derives from Security Council resolution 1379 on children and armed conflict.  Among other things, that resolution included a paragraph requesting the Secretary-General to provide a list of parties to armed conflict that recruited or used children in violation of their international obligations.

Mr. Kelso said the CSC considered the upcoming meeting a breakthrough, because although there had been two or three Council resolutions on children and armed conflict in the past, resolution 1379 went beyond previous resolutions, creating a mechanism to quantify the use of children in armed conflict.

“The report actually creates a list and publicly identifies offenders”, he said.  “And that’s an important lever for asserting some sort of moral suasion over governments, as well as armed groups that are using children.”  Resolution 1379 was a visible sign to those working at the grass roots on the child-soldier issue in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa that Security Council resolutions actually meant something on the ground.  The Coalition’s overall message now was that there should be a new thematic resolution to maintain the listing mechanism and the public shaming that would result for all those using child soldiers.  The criteria, however, should be broadened to include all the different situations where children were being so used.

The report listed 72 different parties currently using children as soldiers, and urged immediate action in those situations.  It listed more than 25 others where it said there should be monitoring, indicating which ones should be on the Security Council agenda and which ones should be monitored.  In Africa, the report listed the government forces of Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda.  In Asia, it listed the government forces of Indonesia and Myanmar.  In the Middle East, it named the government forces of Iraq.  Some 60 non-State armed groups operating in opposition to those governments were also on the Coalition’s list.  For Africa, Sierra Leone and Somalia were listed.  For Latin America, the FARC in Colombia; for Asia, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist guerrillas in Nepal, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and almost 20 armed groups in India.  Almost 100 different non-State armed groups were also listed.

“We created this shadow list because we’re concerned that it should be representative of the huge child soldier problem that exists in the world today, and we hope that, by providing this list to the media and to concerned non-governmental organizations, it can become some sort of resource that you can use to see who is who in terms of the child-soldier issue”, Mr. Kelso told

correspondents.  The Coalition’s list would probably be more extensive than the roster the Secretary-General would present to the Council.  He explained that this was because the Coalition had included situations where child soldiers had been abducted in the recent past, including Angola and Sierra Leone.  And although it could be said that conflicts in those countries were a thing of the past, there were still thousands of former child soldiers who had not been demobilized and who were at risk of being recruited all over again.

Situations with regional implications were also included, he said.  Countries such as Myanmar, Colombia, and Sri Lanka all constituted a threat to the international peace and security of their regions, the Coalition believed.  Children as young as 11 were forcibly recruited into Myanmar’s national army.  With an estimated 70,000 children in its ranks, the world’s largest single use of child soldiers was in Myanmar, while there were an estimated 6,000–14,000 child soldiers in Colombia.  There, boys and girls as young as eight years old were recruited and were still being recruited into the armed opposition groups, paramilitaries and urban militias.  In Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers had a long record of using child soldiers, as well as a record for breaking their commitments to end their use, he told correspondents.

The Secretary-General had delayed releasing his report and was going back to do “a little bit more work” on what remained in terms of its drafting, said

Mr. Kelso.  That was a hopeful sign that more countries could be included in the Secretary-General’s report and on the list for the Council debate.

He said the Coalition was making five key recommendations:  firstly, it wanted the Security Council to hold this debate as an annual event that would widen the criteria for next year’s list, encompassing all situations in which children were used as soldiers in conflict situations.  That was important, because the word was out among governments that there was a “thematic fatigue” and that yet another thematic Council resolution was not going to do enough.  But the Coalition was of the view that for once there was a chance of a Council resolution that would result in concrete measures for dealing with the child-soldier issue.

Secondly, it urged the Security Council to take immediate action to make children’s rights a reality in conflict situations it had examined.  The Coalition had made a series of detailed recommendations on each of the 25 country situations at issue.

Thirdly, the Coalition asked the Security Council to commit itself to follow up on the parties named in this year’s discussion, inviting those governments and groups, as well as others, to explain their use of child soldiers and engage them in a dialogue on how to end it.

Fourthly, the Council should evaluate progress made in those situations by asking for six-month interim reports and considering appropriate future action if progress had not been made.  Finally, the Coalition requested the Security Council to make field visits to the gravest situations threatening children.

In conjunction with the Council debate, said Mr. Kelso, the Coalition was also holding an all-day symposium to discuss the policy implications of resolution 1379 and how to make it a reality.  The symposium was expected to bring together academics, human rights and humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.  It would be held at UNICEF House in New York tomorrow.

In her remarks to correspondents, Ms. Vandergrift said the Coalition was formed for the purpose of stopping the use of children as soldiers.  The Coalition’s first project was to establish the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force last year.  The second major project was a global report on the situation of children as soldiers in armed forces.  The Coalition welcomed the Council’s move to have a more detailed report for its meeting this year.

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