Suffer the Children

Recent UN reports highlighted the urgent need to protect children from poverty, poor health, and child labor. Although the Convention on the Right of the Children has been ratified by 192 countries, children continue to suffer massive abuses of rights including the loss of the right to life and liberty.

The international community adopted legal instruments for the human rights of children with some of the most extensive and rapidly agreed human rights legislations. The rights of the children were specifically recognized in the 1959 Declaration on the Rights of the Child adopted by the United Nations. The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women recognized the special need for protection of young girls.  But it was not until November 1989 that the UN General Assembly adopted The Convention on the Rights of the Child, recognizing the children’s entitlement to the full range of human rights—civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.

In 1990, the Convention obtained the 20 ratifications required for its entry into force as international law.

A UNICEF report published by Innocenti Rearch Center in 2005, points out that 192 countries have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child and that only Somalia and the United States stood out by their failure to ratify the Convention.

The report warns that the time has come when the refusal of the US to ratify can no longer be ignored because “U.S. non-participation is gradually being transformed into more active opposition” to the Convention on the Right of the Child.

Still, children continue to suffer from hunger and diseases, from exploitation as child laborers, from displacement as refugees, and, tragically, are victims of violent conflicts.

International law provides that children have the right to be protected in armed conflicts, to be free from arbitrary deprivation of liberty, to receive appropriate treatment in the justice system.

A UN Report condemned the deliberate victimization of children as it estimated that from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s, “two million children have been killed in armed conflict.”

Children were directly targeted in the barbaric genocides in Rwanda as the world stood by and watched the horrors.

The United Nations set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994 and some of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide have been brought to justice.

In a sorry reflection on international law and its subservience to international politics, the same United Nations Security Council that set up the Rwanda Tribunals, played a facilitating role in the imposition of sanctions on Iraq. These sanctions resulted in the scandalous victimization of Iraqi children. And it was no accident.

A United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report in 1999 estimated that half a million Iraqi children had died because of the sanctions.

"American officials may quarrel with the numbers," an article in the New York Times Magazine stated, "but there is little doubt that at least several hundred thousand children who could reasonably have been expected to live died before their fifth birthdays." (NYT magazine, July 27, 2003) There is also little doubt that the destruction of Iraqi infrastructures including the power plants and water purification system-resulting in deadly epidemics- was systematic and deliberate. Col. John Warden, described as the architect of the air campaign against Iraq, was quoted by the Washington Post as admitting that: “What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effects of the sanctions.” (Washington Post, June 23, 1991)

In May 1996, Lesley Stahl of the CBS News Program 60 Minutes asked then US  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

In an infamous admission of responsibility for the murderous impact of sanctions on Iraqi children and callous disregard for the fate of the children, Albright said: “we think the price is worth it.” (May 12, 1996)

The veteran Irish diplomat Denis Halliday, who resigned as UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq in 1998 to protest against the sanctions, said that the US, and specifically the Clinton administration, could “be blamed for crimes against humanity, including possibly genocide” because of the sanctions.“

But no UN Tribunal is likely to be set up to determine criminal responsibility for the children who died in Iraq because of the sanctions.

Children were victimized in the recent Israeli war against Lebanon. A November 2006 report by Amnesty International found that “even though the war is over children continue to be killed and injured by unexploded cluster bombs launched by the Israeli army…”

In Palestine, the children continue to pay a heavy price. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem annual statistics report for 2006, highlighted the fact that since the beginning of the second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000, Palestinian attackers killed 119 Israeli children while Israeli forces had killed 811 Palestinian children. In Gaza alone, over the past few months, Israeli forces had killed some 405 Palestinians including 88 children.

The B’Tselem report also found that as of November 2006, of the 9,075 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, 345 were children, and that of these 22 children were held without trial and without knowing the charges against them.

We are reminded daily that children in Iraq continue to be victimized, as in the following recent dramatic example. On January 28, a shell hit a Baghdad Girls school and killed five girls aged 12 to 16, and wounded at least 20, “tearing limb from limb, shattering glass, shredding the students’ blue and white uniforms and leaving the survivors bloodied and confused.” (NYT, January 29, 007)

Prof. Adel Safty is Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Siberian Academy of Public Administration, Russia. His latest book, Leadership and Democracy, is published in New York