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End violence in Algeria, UNICEF urges

Friday, 26 September 1997-- UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy today appealed for an end to the on-going massacres of civilians in Algeria, in which scores of women and children have been among the victims. She urged that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan's Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, take up the matter on a priority basis.

While UNICEF recognizes that any initiative may be difficult, it urges that every conceivable avenue be explored to bring an end to the violence. "I call on the perpetrators to put an immediate stop to this incomprehensible slaughter," Ms. Bellamy said. "The targeting of children and women in Algeria, or anywhere, is an appalling trend."

She spoke amid news reports that as many as 200 people were shot or stabbed to death in Algiers, the Algerian capital, in an attack this week. Massacres have become increasingly frequent, with some 300 civilians slaughtered only last month on 29 August in Rais, some 15 miles south of the capital.

She said that the continuing spiral of violence and targeting of civilians, including children and women, is in violation of both the Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflicts and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was ratified by Algeria in April 1993. With ratification, the Convention becomes the law of the State or country.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child, now ratified by almost every nation in the world, stands alone in international human rights law as the clearest expression of what the world community has established as minimum standards for protecting the rights of children. It obliges nations to "ensure the protection and care of children who are affected by armed conflict".

What is happening in Algeria makes a mockery of that undertaking, Ms. Bellamy said. The Special Representative on Children and Armed Conflict, who assumed office on 1 September, is expected to provide momentum and followup to the ground-breaking work undertaken by Graça Machel, who authored the Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, which was presented to the General Assembly last year.

That report detailed the suffering of children caught up in some 30 wars raging around the world and said it was unforgivable that children are assaulted, violated, and murdered. "Not only are large numbers of children killed and injured," it said, "but countless others grow up deprived of their material and emotional needs, including the structures that give meaning to social and cultural life." It said the entire fabric of their societies - homes, schools, health system and religious institutions - is being torn to pieces.

"UNICEF has a mandate and an absolute obligation to speak on behalf of all children caught up in civil conflict, regardless of the politics of the situation," Ms. Bellamy said. "And we will continue to speak out in the strongest terms against attacks on children and women, whenever and wherever they occur."

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