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Prosecute war crimes against children, UNICEF urges

Friday, 9 May 1997: UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy today called for the establishment of an international criminal court and a permanent prosecutor's office so that atrocities committed against children in conflict cannot go unpunished.

Ms. Bellamy's comments followed the conviction this week, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, of a Bosnian Serb soldier on 11 counts of crimes against humanity. "The conviction restores faith in the international legal system," she said.

Ms. Bellamy's call for action endorses the recommendation of a United Nations-sponsored report prepared by Mozambican Graça Machel, Expert of the Secretary-General on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children. The report, presented to the UN General Assembly in November 1996, warns that if perpetrators of war crimes go unpunished, it will lead to contempt for the law and renewed cycles of violence.

"Unless those at every level of political and military command fear that they will be held accountable for crimes and subject to prosecution, there is little prospect of restraining their behaviour during armed conflicts," Ms. Machel states.

The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague has taken a full year to convict one man. The Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which handles cases of genocide and crimes against humanity, has yet to bring a conviction.

"A permanent court would not only speed up the process," Ms. Bellamy said, "It would be a major step towards protecting children caught up in armed conflict."

Ms. Bellamy deplored the endless atrocities directed against children, making them the deliberate targets of violence by combatants.

• On 7 May, a bomb was planted outside a high school in Algeria. The blast killed five students and wounded 32 others. Many of the 300 Algerian civilians who have been killed in the violence of the past month were children. In the most savage massacre, children watched their mothers' heads being hacked off before they too were killed. Three of the children murdered were aged between nine months and four years.
• On 4 May, in Zaire's Biaro Camp to the south of Kisangani, at least 80 Rwandan Hutu refugee children crawled out of the forest bearing terrible wounds from machetes and bullets.
• On 29 April, in Burundi, Hutu rebels attacked a secondary school in the south of the country, killing 34 children and wounding another 34.
• On 28 April, militiamen massacred 17 schoolgirls and a Belgian nun and wounded 14 other girls in attacks on two schools in north-western Rwanda.
• On 26 April, armed soldiers abducted 52 weak and malnourished Rwandan refugee children from a paediatric hospital near Bukavu. They were returned after media reports instigated a world outcry, but 10 of the children are reportedly still in serious medical condition as a result of the abduction.

These are only the most recent incidents. There have been countless others. The world must not be permitted to forget the abduction of 6-10,000 children by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda; nor the widespread rape of girls and women in Bosnia and Herzegovina; nor the children who disappeared in the brutal civil wars of Central America.

"These children were not caught in crossfire. They were not incidental victims of the chaos of war. We have to recognize that these incidents represent a deliberate targeting of children as part of an orchestrated campaign to terrorize and subjugate entire communities," Ms. Bellamy said. "Whole societies lose their bearings when children are sacrificed on the altar of adult hatred."

UNICEF believes that those responsible cannot and must not be allowed to act with impunity. A permanent international criminal court, and a permanent prosecutor's office would mean that, for the first time, the world will have the capacity to bring to justice those responsible for the torture, the rape and the murder of children.

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