New York Times - October 28, 2010
Somali Islamists Kill Two Girls Branded Spies
By MOHAMMED IBRAHIM
MOGADISHU, Somalia — Somalia’s most powerful Islamist insurgents, the Shabab, executed two teenage girls on Wednesday after deciding they were spies, setting off fears among residents, officials and witnesses said.
The two teenagers — one 18, the other 14 — were shot by firing squad in the center of the town of Beledweyne, near the border with Ethiopia, witnesses said.
Pickup trucks with big loudspeakers drove into the town, ordering the residents to watch the execution. Residents were also told to switch off their cellphones and were warned not to take pictures, a prohibition that has been enforced at some Islamist executions in the past.
“The teenage girls were executed in the regional headquarters at the center of the town. Some of the women who were watching fainted at the scene,” said Abukar Elmi, a witness. “This is a shocking event.”
The Shabab official in the town, Sheik Yusuf Ali Ugas, told local journalists that “the two girls were found guilty of spying for the Ethiopian government.”
Ethiopia invaded Somalia in 2006 to oust an Islamist movement that had taken control of much of the country, including the capital, Mogadishu. Thousands of Ethiopian soldiers remained in Somalia for the next three years before withdrawing, and some of the Somali government forces fighting the Shabab in the Beledweyne area are supported by the Ethiopian government.
Mr. Ugas said the teenagers were not the only ones in Shabab custody, adding, “There are many people now in Shabab prisons in Beledweyne.”
He also sent a warning to Ethiopia, saying that the Shabab knew “all the informants serving for the Ethiopian government.”
Townspeople argued that the two teenage girls were innocent. The girls, they said, were traveling away from their families when they were caught in a cross-fire just outside Beledweyne, where both government forces and the Shabab are positioned. Many Somalis try to reach Yemen and Saudi Arabia to find better opportunities there and escape from the violence in this country.
“When the fighting started between the Shabab and the government forces just outside Beledweyne, the girls had to flee to the bush, where they were finally caught,” said a resident whose name was withheld for his safety. “I think they were executed because they were caught at the front line.”
The Somali transitional federal government strongly condemned the public execution, arguing that the two girls had not been given the right to a legal defense, nor had their parents even been informed.
“This execution is yet another human rights abuse committed by the criminals,” the Somali government said. “This act of killing innocent children does not have Islamic and humanitarian justifications.”
The Shabab have been responsible for many human rights violations in the areas they control. In 2008, for instance, they stoned to death a rape victim in the port town of Kismayo.
This article was found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/world/africa/29somalia.html
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Showing posts with label child soldiers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label child soldiers. Show all posts
11 Jan 2011
7 Nov 2010
Christian extremist Lord’s Resistance Army still enslaving children in Africa
Middle East Online - August 30, 2009
Christian extremist LRA still enslaving children
Many child victims fail to escape Christian extremism of LRA amid terror that reaches south Sudan.
Former LRA child soldier: 'They made me their slave'
JUBA, Sudan - The boys were fishing when the rebel fighters struck, dragging them off for a slave life in one of the world’s most notorious guerrilla armies.
"I thought they would kill me," said 16-year old Genekpio Kumbayo, seized in December from the farming village of Faraj, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "I was so terrified, I couldn't talk."
Kumbayo was captured by the Christian extremist Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan-led rebel group, whose two-decades-long campaign of guerrilla raids continues to terrorise a vast swathe of land across several nations in the region.
"For five months they forced me to carry all their equipment," Kumbayo said quietly.
"I had no choice, they made me their slave - they kept us moving through the forests, always hard at work."
Unlike others, Kumbayo was relatively lucky.
He escaped into neighbouring southern Sudan in April when Ugandan troops attacked the Christian extremist rebels, but was shot in the leg in the crossfire.
Ugandan soldiers began a military operation in December on remote rebel bases in the DR Congo after peace talks failed -- triggering a wave of brutal attacks as Christian extremist LRA fighters scattered, carrying out reprisal raids.
More than 230,000 people have fled their homes in south Sudan since late 2008 as a result of the Christian militant LRA, according to UN estimates.
In addition, more than 25,000 refugees from the DR Congo and the Central African Republic (CAR) have arrived seeking shelter.
But the attacks continue.
Since late July, more than 180 people have been killed in radical LRA attacks in south Sudan and the numbers of refugees and displaced are rising, said Lise Grande, the UN’s top humanitarian official for southern Sudan.
"The LRA continues to wreak havoc" she said.
"The picture does not look very good. Violence is continuing in the DR Congo and CAR, raising the concern of future displacements and increased numbers of refugees," she added.
Aid workers and UN staff were even forced to evacuate by helicopter in early August from Ezo, on Sudan’s border with DR Congo, after LRA extremist rebels attacked the remote settlement.
The rebels appear to have timed their raid for when the community was gathered for a church service, looting stores and abducting 17 people, including several children.
Many fear that after a period of relative calm the Christian extremist rebels are regrouping, attacking to secure fresh recruits and to replenish supplies.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has warned of an "unprecedented" wave of attacks in the DR Congo -- with 55 attacks in July alone in the north-eastern Orientale province.
"Some 360,000 Congolese have been uprooted in successive LRA attacks in the Orientale province in north-eastern DR Congo," according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"The levels of fear are incredibly high," said Katharine Derderian, a humanitarian advisor for the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) just back from an assessment in DR Congo.
"People are too scared to even send their children to school, because they fear the LRA will attack.
"It’s a fragile situation. People are being forced into urban areas where resources are stretched in terms of medical services, education and food."
LRA rebel chief Joseph Kony, who began his battle over 20 years ago, is said to have named one of his sons “George Bush” in 2006.
The guerrilla group aims to establish a theocratic government in Uganda, based on the Christian Bible and the Ten Commandments.
Their ferocious attacks, with rebels chopping off the limbs and lips of their victims, were often aimed more at the civilians they said they fought for than at the military.
The LRA's top Christian leaders -- fugitives from the International Criminal Court -- are accused of having forcibly enlisted child soldiers and sex slaves, and of slaughtering tens of thousands of people.
"They continue to threaten our people," said Colonel Joseph Ngere Paciko, deputy state governor of Western Equatoria. Bordering DR Congo, it is the Sudanese region hit hardest by the radical LRA.
Southern Sudanese troops are working closely with Ugandan forces based in Sudan, who cross into DR Congo to chase the rebels.
"Our patrols are ready, and eventually we will get them," added Paciko.
But analysts warn there will be no easy solution.
"A few LRA fighters can paralyse and scare an entire population," said Louise Khabure, of the International Crisis Group think tank.
"They continue to do so in DR Congo, Sudan and CAR for now, and it does not preclude Uganda in future."
Khabure was critical of current military operations against them, which she said were "inappropriate for handling guerrilla operations".
With oil-rich south Sudan due to vote on independence in 2011, some fear the LRA may resume its role as a proxy force for those keen to block the emergence of a fully autonomous south.
"The fact that Kony does not seem cornered is very telling, he is not calling anyone for talks. They surely are being harboured somewhere," said Khabure.
But those in the affected areas simply want the fighting to stop.
"I just want to go home," Kumbayo said softly, sitting quietly on a bed in a packed surgery ward in the southern Sudanese capital Juba, where he is being supported by the UN children’s fund, UNICEF.
The gunshot wound to his leg has healed, but he is still searching for his parents. His home village was also attacked by the rebels.
"There is no news from my family," he adds sadly. "I just want to see my mother again."
Some 125,000 flee east DR Congo rebel attacks
At least 125,000 people have fled their homes in eastern DR Congo over the past three weeks amid "large scale destruction" by Ugandan rebels, the UN refugee agency said Friday.
"The Ugandan rebel group, the so-called Lord's Resistance Army, continues to cause large scale destruction and displacement in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo," said Andrej Mahecic, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"At least 125,000 people are known to have been driven out of their villages in Haut Uele district of Orientale province by the LRA in the last three weeks alone," he added.
Some 1,270 people have been killed and over half a million people uprooted from the province by the violence since September 2008.
"The rebel group is accused of widespread killings, kidnappings of civilians and raping of women," said Mahecic.
The UNHCR also lamented that the insecurity and impassable roads were hampering relief agencies' ability to access the needy.
The DR Congo, Ugandan and South Sudanese armies had launched a major joint military operation against the LRA from the end of 2008 to March 2009, but failed to quell the rebel force, which has long battled in north Uganda and retreated across the DRC border.
This article was found at:
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=33967
7 Nov 2008
Religion and Child Abuse
From the website of the Council for Secular Humanism
Religion and Child Abuse
by Innaiah Narisetti
Innaiah Narisetti is the chair of the Center for Inquiry/India. This article is excerpted from a paper that he was to present at the Center for Inquiry’s congress in China in October 2007.
Over the years, the abuse of children has received substantial attention worldwide. The United Nations, through its member organizations such as UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), has focused on this issue, recognizing the worst forms of such abuse. These include child labor, in which an estimated 250 million children are engaged in some form due to the practice of slavery, bondage linked to family debts, or serfdom; as well as the forced recruitment and involvement of children in armed conflicts, child pornography and prostitution, and the production and trafficking of illicit drugs.
The International Labor Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and UNESCO hold regular discussions at various levels and organize international conventions. The UN has adopted a world declaration for the protection of children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
The human rights of children and the standards to which all governments must aspire in realizing these rights for all children are most concisely and fully articulated in one international human-rights treaty: the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention is the most universally accepted human-rights instrument in history. It has been ratified by every country in the world except two: the United States and Somalia. It places children at center stage in the quest for the universal application of human rights. By ratifying this instrument, national governments have committed themselves to protecting and ensuring children’s rights and have agreed to hold themselves accountable for this commitment before the international community.
While it is unfortunate that a powerful country such as the United States has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN’s efforts are salutary and place much-needed emphasis on improving the lives of children globally.
THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION
However, despite all the effort and rhetoric about protecting children and their rights, there is a severe shortcoming in the global campaign to protect children: the influence of religion and its continuing contribution to many forms of child abuse all around the world.
Such abuse begins with the involuntary involvement of children in religious practices from the time they are born. All religions, through ritual, preaching, and religious texts, seek to bring children into day-to-day religious practice. This gives holy books and scriptures, as well as those who teach them, an early grip on the developing minds of young people, leaving an indelible impression on them. In many cases, most notably in the Catholic Church, this forced and prolonged exposure of children to religious institutions has also been a key factor in the physical, mental, and sexual abuse of children by religious leaders.
This early grip is so strong that very few people, once grown, ever get an opportunity to change their minds, despite being exposed to science and rational thinking, or even other religious systems. Religious beliefs thrive by imposing themselves upon impressionable minds and gaining their blind adherence to certain dogmatic practices. In some ways, this lays the groundwork for sustained psychological abuse of young children by allowing adults the use of religion as a pretext for various other forms of abuse such as forcing them to fight in wars in the name of religion and ethnicity. During 2004, about 300,000 children served as soldiers in national armies, worldwide.
When it comes to the forced inculcation of religion and the resulting abuses of children in the name of religion, the UN, all of its affiliated organizations, and almost all national governments remain steadfastly silent.
THE UN’S RELUCTANCE
In one form or another, all religions violate the rights of children. Yet a body like the UN, which allows the Vatican to be represented among its member countries, is unaware of—or more likely—unable and unwilling to stand up to the Vatican regarding the religious abuse of children. There is significant pressure from the Vatican to pull back on or dilute any resolutions that point to religion as a cause of abuse or strife. Add to this the unwillingness of the UN to confront its member countries, especially those in the Muslim world, which can also exert a lot of pressure when it comes to issues related to the abuse of children by their religious schools (madrassas) where, for example, very young children are forced to memorize six thousand verses of the Qur’an, a process that involves both mental and physical abuse.
As a result, the UN and its affiliated agencies tend to focus on addressing just the symptoms rather than the root causes of some of the most insidious forms of child abuse. For example, while everyone speaks out against genital mutilation, UNICEF is unwilling to acknowledge and condemn it as a religious practice. Instead, it talks about educating communities and spends millions of dollars on medical kits to treat those children who have already been mutilated. By not forcefully pointing the finger at the real culprits—religious practices—the UN is not only missing a good opportunity to fix the problem at its source but also putting too small a bandage on a very deep wound.
GENDER DISCRIMINATION
Another area in which religions contribute to child abuse is through explicit and implicit gender discrimination that leads to unequal rights and opportunities between boys and girls and contributes to further abuses. While economic factors are also to blame, the roots of this inequity lie in religious and social mores. How can the UN hope to tackle the problem of child labor or a lack of educational opportunity among the children in 130 developing countries who are not in primary school, the majority of them being girls? In the Islamic world, some female students are allowed to attend certain madrassas. However, they are forced to learn in classrooms, or even buildings, separate from their male peers.
There is a global unwillingness to acknowledge that all religions use their educational institutions and programs, be they Sunday schools, madrassas, or Jewish or Hindu temples to indoctrinate children. Sometimes, this is in the guise of conveying good moral values, but, while it may be much more rigid and overt in, say, a madrassa, it is no less influential on young minds in a Christian Sunday school.
Ultimately, all such programs try to instill a belief in the superiority of one religion and inculcate an unquestioning faith in that system.
THE DEBATE MUST BEGIN!
Just as we all stand up against child marriage, because marriage is an institution meant for adults, and just as we do not let children participate in certain civic duties, such as voting, until they reach a certain age, the time has come to debate the participation of children in religious institutions. While some might see it as a matter better left to parents, the negative influence of religion and its subsequent contribution to child abuse from religious beliefs and practices requires us to ask whether organized religion is an institution that needs limits set on how early it should have access to children.
There is no doubt that this will be a controversial position. However, there is nothing to prevent the UN from organizing a world convention on the issue of the religious abuse of children, a forum where the pros and cons of childhood exposure to religion and its influence on children can be openly debated. The world body cannot remain silent on this vital issue just because it is a sensitive and difficult subject, even given its member nations and their religious interests. A convention like this would also be an opportunity for those who might want to argue for the benefits of the influence of religion on children, so the UN should not shy away from debate of the issue.
If such a convention clearly shows that religion contributes to child abuse globally, the UN must then take a clear stand on the issue of the forced involvement of children in religious practices; it must speak up for the rights of children and not the automatic right of parents and societies to pass on religious beliefs, and it must reexamine whether an organization like the Vatican should belong to the UN.
Until this happens, millions of children worldwide will continue to be abused in the name of religion, and the efforts made by the UN will continue to address the symptoms but not the disease.
This article was found at:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=narisetti_27_4
Religion and Child Abuse
by Innaiah Narisetti
Innaiah Narisetti is the chair of the Center for Inquiry/India. This article is excerpted from a paper that he was to present at the Center for Inquiry’s congress in China in October 2007.
Over the years, the abuse of children has received substantial attention worldwide. The United Nations, through its member organizations such as UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), has focused on this issue, recognizing the worst forms of such abuse. These include child labor, in which an estimated 250 million children are engaged in some form due to the practice of slavery, bondage linked to family debts, or serfdom; as well as the forced recruitment and involvement of children in armed conflicts, child pornography and prostitution, and the production and trafficking of illicit drugs.
The International Labor Organization, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and UNESCO hold regular discussions at various levels and organize international conventions. The UN has adopted a world declaration for the protection of children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
THE CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD
The human rights of children and the standards to which all governments must aspire in realizing these rights for all children are most concisely and fully articulated in one international human-rights treaty: the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention is the most universally accepted human-rights instrument in history. It has been ratified by every country in the world except two: the United States and Somalia. It places children at center stage in the quest for the universal application of human rights. By ratifying this instrument, national governments have committed themselves to protecting and ensuring children’s rights and have agreed to hold themselves accountable for this commitment before the international community.
While it is unfortunate that a powerful country such as the United States has yet to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN’s efforts are salutary and place much-needed emphasis on improving the lives of children globally.
THE INFLUENCE OF RELIGION
However, despite all the effort and rhetoric about protecting children and their rights, there is a severe shortcoming in the global campaign to protect children: the influence of religion and its continuing contribution to many forms of child abuse all around the world.
Such abuse begins with the involuntary involvement of children in religious practices from the time they are born. All religions, through ritual, preaching, and religious texts, seek to bring children into day-to-day religious practice. This gives holy books and scriptures, as well as those who teach them, an early grip on the developing minds of young people, leaving an indelible impression on them. In many cases, most notably in the Catholic Church, this forced and prolonged exposure of children to religious institutions has also been a key factor in the physical, mental, and sexual abuse of children by religious leaders.
This early grip is so strong that very few people, once grown, ever get an opportunity to change their minds, despite being exposed to science and rational thinking, or even other religious systems. Religious beliefs thrive by imposing themselves upon impressionable minds and gaining their blind adherence to certain dogmatic practices. In some ways, this lays the groundwork for sustained psychological abuse of young children by allowing adults the use of religion as a pretext for various other forms of abuse such as forcing them to fight in wars in the name of religion and ethnicity. During 2004, about 300,000 children served as soldiers in national armies, worldwide.
When it comes to the forced inculcation of religion and the resulting abuses of children in the name of religion, the UN, all of its affiliated organizations, and almost all national governments remain steadfastly silent.
THE UN’S RELUCTANCE
In one form or another, all religions violate the rights of children. Yet a body like the UN, which allows the Vatican to be represented among its member countries, is unaware of—or more likely—unable and unwilling to stand up to the Vatican regarding the religious abuse of children. There is significant pressure from the Vatican to pull back on or dilute any resolutions that point to religion as a cause of abuse or strife. Add to this the unwillingness of the UN to confront its member countries, especially those in the Muslim world, which can also exert a lot of pressure when it comes to issues related to the abuse of children by their religious schools (madrassas) where, for example, very young children are forced to memorize six thousand verses of the Qur’an, a process that involves both mental and physical abuse.
As a result, the UN and its affiliated agencies tend to focus on addressing just the symptoms rather than the root causes of some of the most insidious forms of child abuse. For example, while everyone speaks out against genital mutilation, UNICEF is unwilling to acknowledge and condemn it as a religious practice. Instead, it talks about educating communities and spends millions of dollars on medical kits to treat those children who have already been mutilated. By not forcefully pointing the finger at the real culprits—religious practices—the UN is not only missing a good opportunity to fix the problem at its source but also putting too small a bandage on a very deep wound.
GENDER DISCRIMINATION
Another area in which religions contribute to child abuse is through explicit and implicit gender discrimination that leads to unequal rights and opportunities between boys and girls and contributes to further abuses. While economic factors are also to blame, the roots of this inequity lie in religious and social mores. How can the UN hope to tackle the problem of child labor or a lack of educational opportunity among the children in 130 developing countries who are not in primary school, the majority of them being girls? In the Islamic world, some female students are allowed to attend certain madrassas. However, they are forced to learn in classrooms, or even buildings, separate from their male peers.
There is a global unwillingness to acknowledge that all religions use their educational institutions and programs, be they Sunday schools, madrassas, or Jewish or Hindu temples to indoctrinate children. Sometimes, this is in the guise of conveying good moral values, but, while it may be much more rigid and overt in, say, a madrassa, it is no less influential on young minds in a Christian Sunday school.
Ultimately, all such programs try to instill a belief in the superiority of one religion and inculcate an unquestioning faith in that system.
THE DEBATE MUST BEGIN!
Just as we all stand up against child marriage, because marriage is an institution meant for adults, and just as we do not let children participate in certain civic duties, such as voting, until they reach a certain age, the time has come to debate the participation of children in religious institutions. While some might see it as a matter better left to parents, the negative influence of religion and its subsequent contribution to child abuse from religious beliefs and practices requires us to ask whether organized religion is an institution that needs limits set on how early it should have access to children.
There is no doubt that this will be a controversial position. However, there is nothing to prevent the UN from organizing a world convention on the issue of the religious abuse of children, a forum where the pros and cons of childhood exposure to religion and its influence on children can be openly debated. The world body cannot remain silent on this vital issue just because it is a sensitive and difficult subject, even given its member nations and their religious interests. A convention like this would also be an opportunity for those who might want to argue for the benefits of the influence of religion on children, so the UN should not shy away from debate of the issue.
If such a convention clearly shows that religion contributes to child abuse globally, the UN must then take a clear stand on the issue of the forced involvement of children in religious practices; it must speak up for the rights of children and not the automatic right of parents and societies to pass on religious beliefs, and it must reexamine whether an organization like the Vatican should belong to the UN.
Until this happens, millions of children worldwide will continue to be abused in the name of religion, and the efforts made by the UN will continue to address the symptoms but not the disease.
This article was found at:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=narisetti_27_4
9 Sept 2008
Preventing violent extremism. "We must teach young people how to recognize totalitarian groups."
New Statesman - UK
September 8, 2008
There is no single, or simple, demographic or psychological profile of those likely to be recruited to take part in acts of terror argues academic Alexandra Stein
by Alexandra Stein
We now have a new record: last month Britain’s youngest terrorist was convicted. Hammaad Munshi was only 15 when he was recruited by the then 20 year-old Aabid Khan. Khan, according to the Guardian, had “links to proscribed terrorist groups” including al-Qaeda, and is believed to have visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
This article was found at:
http://newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/09/groups-recruited-social-young
September 8, 2008
There is no single, or simple, demographic or psychological profile of those likely to be recruited to take part in acts of terror argues academic Alexandra Stein
by Alexandra Stein
We now have a new record: last month Britain’s youngest terrorist was convicted. Hammaad Munshi was only 15 when he was recruited by the then 20 year-old Aabid Khan. Khan, according to the Guardian, had “links to proscribed terrorist groups” including al-Qaeda, and is believed to have visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
A recent MI5 report confirmed what many scholars of terrorist and cultic groups have long known: there is no single, or simple, demographic or psychological profile of those likely to be recruited. Social psychologists such as Philip Zimbardo have for years argued that it is the strong situation of increasing isolation within closed, coercive groups that creates these dangerous behaviors. This is what is critical, not the particular psychology or disposition of the individual.
Further, and contrary to Mark Sageman, a former CIA agent, these are not simply “bunches of guys” who organise themselves into suicidal acts of terror. What we are seeing is the deliberate targeting and recruitment of youth by well-organized internationally-linked extremist groups, as, for instance described by Ed Husain in his book The Islamist, or by Masoud Banisadr in his account of the Iranian Mojahedin.
How then do we protect both the potential victims of these acts, and the young people who are recruited into these extremist groups? We know young people are being recruited in further education colleges and now, like Munshi, at even younger ages. How are we preparing these young people for these assaults on their autonomy and, eventually, on their lives?
Social psychologists, such as Zimbardo, who study extremist groups, cults and coercive persuasion understand that the key to prevention is education. This is education about the structures and processes of totalitarian, ideologically extremist groups.
I recently taught a course on Cults and Totalitarianism to two groups of students at the University of Minnesota in the midwestern US. We covered the social psychology, structures and processes of groups as varied as Lyndon LaRouche’s right-wing political cult, the sexually abusive Children of God, and Pol Pot’s totalitarian and murderous regime in 1970s Cambodia. Several students stated that during the term of the course itself they had cause to use this new information to help either themselves or friends and family to stay away from dangerous groups. Other students asked me why this sort of information hadn't been made available at an earlier stage in their education.
We must teach young people how to recognize totalitarian groups. Drawing on work from Hannah Arendt, Robert Jay Lifton and others, we can start with this five point definition:
- The group is led by a charismatic and authoritarian leader
- It is isolating and has a closed, steeply hierarchical inner structure
- The group adheres to an absolute and exclusive belief system (a total ideology)
- Processes of coercive persuasion are used to isolate followers and control them through a combined dynamic of “love” and fear
- Followers are exploited
These groups succeed because they operate based on universal human (and usually adaptive) responses of people seeking comfort and connection when afraid. The process unfolds by isolating recruits from prior sources of comfort, establishing the group as the new safe haven, and then instilling fear to create what is known as a trauma bond. This is now well-understood by social psychologists. It can be taught in interesting and understandable ways to young people.
We must take a strategic view to introduce this into the curriculum. Educators must collaborate with experts in this field to train teachers in both the classic social-psychological studies as well as the most up-to-date research available and work to develop materials and curricula for classrooms at various age levels.
For over 60 years social scientists have been developing a broad knowledge base about these fundamental human vulnerabilities and the groups and situations that exploit them. In her 1987 volume, Prisons we choose to live inside, nobel laureate Doris Lessing argued for disseminating this knowledge to our children in order to challenge our “most primitive and instinctive reactions” -- those reactions which so often have led us to act against our own interests and our own survival. We cannot wait any longer to take this on.
Perhaps then a future 15-year-old – one who has had some basic education in the structures, processes and dangers of totalitarian groups – will be able to recognize and turn away from a recruiter who promises liberation and glory but who will deliver only suicidal sacrifice.
Alexandra Stein is visiting lecturer, Birkbeck, Faculty of Lifelong LearningThis article was found at:
http://newstatesman.com/international-politics/2008/09/groups-recruited-social-young
16 Jul 2008
Free Omar Khadr
National Post - Canada
July 15, 2008
Opinion | Jonathan Kay
This is a bad day for Canada. As I write this at 1pm Tuesday, piteous video images from Omar Khadr's interrogation at Guantanamo Bay are not only the #1 news item on the National Post web site, but also the lead item on BBC News and USA Today. Millions of Web surfers are now wondering why Canada's government has acquiesced — and as the video shows, even participated — in the unconscionable treatment of a blubbering boy-soldier.
As someone who otherwise considers himself one of the War on Terror's noisiest Canadian cheerleaders, I submit that the bleeding hearts are right on this one: Omar Khadr needs to come home.
Here's why:
Omar Khadr was a child soldier. During the carnage that gripped Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the most terrifying crimes were often committed by gangs of children who'd been abducted by the Revolutionary United Front. Isolated from their family, and stripped of any sort of moral compass, these child brigades were renowned for such monstrous acts as hacking off the legs and arms of defenseless villagers. When the RUF's war with the government ended, many of these children were assimilated back into civilized society. No one — in the West, at least — blamed them for what they had done. As in Sri Lanka, Congo, and other parts of the world where children are abducted and forced into combat, it is universally recognized that child soldiers are not morally culpable for their actions in the same way as adults. That's why the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal didn't prosecute child soldiers — it prosecuted the monsters who exploited them. Can someone please tell me why this principle has not been applied to Omar Khadr, who was all of 15 when he allegedly threw the grenade that killed Sgt Christopher Speer of Delta Force in 2002?
What makes the case for Khadr especially strong is that he was essentially recruited into combat from birth — by his own flesh-and-blood no less. The true monster in the Khadr narrative is not Omar, but his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaeda lieutenant who moved his whole family from Canada to central Asia so they could share in the glory of jihad.
As a nine-year-old, Omar drank in his father's Islamist propaganda — spending months by his father's bed as the jihadi patriarch lay hunger-striking against Pakistani authorities, who'd arrested him on terrorism charges in 1995. Following 9/11, Ahmed (who, thankfully, was dispatched to his celestial virgins in 2003) enlisted his son as a sort of sidekick and maidservant to a jihadi cell hiding out in the Afghan outback. It was in this capacity that Omar tagged along with the pack of terrorists who would eventually be killed in the June 27, 2002 firefight that claimed the life of Sgt Speer.
I have spent today reading a lot of tough talk on the blogs about how Khadr should be "waterboarded until he stops crying" and such. I wonder if those same hawks could tell me how they would have turned out if they'd been told — literally, since the day they were born — about the necessity of jihad and the beauty of martyrdom; if, since early days, they'd been propagandized into believing that the West was waging a genocidal war against Muslims; and that military resistance was the only path of survival. Are we to expect some sort of inborn moral sense to activate — to tell us that everything being told to us by our own parents is wrong — even before one is old enough to shave?
I know about 20,000 former child soldiers in Sierra Leone who could tell you the answer to that question. And unlike Khadr, not one of them stands accused of "Violation of the Law of War."
Omar Khadr probably didn't kill anyone. The U.S. government's line on the events of June 27, 2002 — reported uncritically, for the most part, by the Canadian media — is that a cowardly Khadr popped up from the rubble in the aftermath of a firefight in the Afghan hinterland, killing a U.S. medic who was looking to treat wounded survivors. In fact, the grenade that killed Speer (who was fighting as a solider, whatever his training as a medic) was thrown when the four-hour long battle was still hot — and it is far from clear who threw it: Contrary to initial accounts, there was a second jihadi still alive when the fatal grenade was thrown — and since Khadr was badly wounded at the time, the second militant (who later died) seems the more likely candidate.
(We might also dispense with the idea that Speer was on a mission of mercy: Post-battle testimony from his battlefield companions suggests they were — quite understandably — more interested in shooting the wounded than healing them.)
My own view is that Speer may well have been killed by a grenade thrown by one of his comrades. (Reports from the battle suggest that grenades were flying thick and fast from both sides.) As the Pat Tillman scandal shows, the U.S. military sometimes goes to extraordinary lengths to cover up friendly-fire deaths. And in the Khadr case, his U.S. Department of Defense attorney claims, there is at least one instance in which a U.S. lieutenant-colonel retroactively amended and backdated a battlefield report to buttress the case against Khadr.
Even if Khadr did kill Sgt. Speer, he did so as a soldier, not a terrorist. There's little doubt that Ahmed Khadr was training his sons to be terrorists — the sort of people who blow up buses and restaurants, or who wear civilian clothing as they lie in wait to detonate explosives under vehicle convoys. But what Omar Khadr did on June 27, 2002 wasn't terrorism. It was participation in a military engagement — a fact that can't be changed merely by slapping a label like "unlawful combatant" on him.
Moreover, it was a military engagement fought on American terms: After U.S. soldiers sealed off the village encampment housing Khadr's cell, they prosecuted the siege with about 100 troops, some of them Special Forces, as well as Apache helicopters, F-18 Hornets and A-10 Warthogs. You can say that Khadr was fighting in an evil cause when he was captured, but you can't say that he was preying on the defenseless.
Even if you don't buy anything I've written above, Khadr's treatment still ranks as abominable. Let us assume that Omar Khadr actually threw the grenade that killed Sgt Christopher Speer; that he did so as a cold-blooded killer, not as a soldier; and that his status as a child combatant is irrelevant — in short, that Omar Khadr is a murderer. Well then, how do we treat murderers in Western countries? Answer: We put them in jail. We don't beat them; or move them from cell to cell every three hours; or terrify them with threats of pedophilic rape; or deny them appropriate medical care — all punishments that Khadr has endured — a litany of abuse so traumatic that, according to one piteous detail among many, he took to falling asleep at Guantanamo desperately hugging a Mickey Mouse book brought to him as a gift. In the space of six years incarceration, Khadr has endured more brutality than any ordinary jailbird would endure in 60.
That's punishment enough. Please bring Omar Khadr home.
This article was found at:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/07/15/jonathan-kay-free-omar-khadr.aspx
July 15, 2008
Opinion | Jonathan Kay
This is a bad day for Canada. As I write this at 1pm Tuesday, piteous video images from Omar Khadr's interrogation at Guantanamo Bay are not only the #1 news item on the National Post web site, but also the lead item on BBC News and USA Today. Millions of Web surfers are now wondering why Canada's government has acquiesced — and as the video shows, even participated — in the unconscionable treatment of a blubbering boy-soldier.
As someone who otherwise considers himself one of the War on Terror's noisiest Canadian cheerleaders, I submit that the bleeding hearts are right on this one: Omar Khadr needs to come home.
Here's why:
Omar Khadr was a child soldier. During the carnage that gripped Sierra Leone in the 1990s, the most terrifying crimes were often committed by gangs of children who'd been abducted by the Revolutionary United Front. Isolated from their family, and stripped of any sort of moral compass, these child brigades were renowned for such monstrous acts as hacking off the legs and arms of defenseless villagers. When the RUF's war with the government ended, many of these children were assimilated back into civilized society. No one — in the West, at least — blamed them for what they had done. As in Sri Lanka, Congo, and other parts of the world where children are abducted and forced into combat, it is universally recognized that child soldiers are not morally culpable for their actions in the same way as adults. That's why the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal didn't prosecute child soldiers — it prosecuted the monsters who exploited them. Can someone please tell me why this principle has not been applied to Omar Khadr, who was all of 15 when he allegedly threw the grenade that killed Sgt Christopher Speer of Delta Force in 2002?
What makes the case for Khadr especially strong is that he was essentially recruited into combat from birth — by his own flesh-and-blood no less. The true monster in the Khadr narrative is not Omar, but his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaeda lieutenant who moved his whole family from Canada to central Asia so they could share in the glory of jihad.
As a nine-year-old, Omar drank in his father's Islamist propaganda — spending months by his father's bed as the jihadi patriarch lay hunger-striking against Pakistani authorities, who'd arrested him on terrorism charges in 1995. Following 9/11, Ahmed (who, thankfully, was dispatched to his celestial virgins in 2003) enlisted his son as a sort of sidekick and maidservant to a jihadi cell hiding out in the Afghan outback. It was in this capacity that Omar tagged along with the pack of terrorists who would eventually be killed in the June 27, 2002 firefight that claimed the life of Sgt Speer.
I have spent today reading a lot of tough talk on the blogs about how Khadr should be "waterboarded until he stops crying" and such. I wonder if those same hawks could tell me how they would have turned out if they'd been told — literally, since the day they were born — about the necessity of jihad and the beauty of martyrdom; if, since early days, they'd been propagandized into believing that the West was waging a genocidal war against Muslims; and that military resistance was the only path of survival. Are we to expect some sort of inborn moral sense to activate — to tell us that everything being told to us by our own parents is wrong — even before one is old enough to shave?
I know about 20,000 former child soldiers in Sierra Leone who could tell you the answer to that question. And unlike Khadr, not one of them stands accused of "Violation of the Law of War."
Omar Khadr probably didn't kill anyone. The U.S. government's line on the events of June 27, 2002 — reported uncritically, for the most part, by the Canadian media — is that a cowardly Khadr popped up from the rubble in the aftermath of a firefight in the Afghan hinterland, killing a U.S. medic who was looking to treat wounded survivors. In fact, the grenade that killed Speer (who was fighting as a solider, whatever his training as a medic) was thrown when the four-hour long battle was still hot — and it is far from clear who threw it: Contrary to initial accounts, there was a second jihadi still alive when the fatal grenade was thrown — and since Khadr was badly wounded at the time, the second militant (who later died) seems the more likely candidate.
(We might also dispense with the idea that Speer was on a mission of mercy: Post-battle testimony from his battlefield companions suggests they were — quite understandably — more interested in shooting the wounded than healing them.)
My own view is that Speer may well have been killed by a grenade thrown by one of his comrades. (Reports from the battle suggest that grenades were flying thick and fast from both sides.) As the Pat Tillman scandal shows, the U.S. military sometimes goes to extraordinary lengths to cover up friendly-fire deaths. And in the Khadr case, his U.S. Department of Defense attorney claims, there is at least one instance in which a U.S. lieutenant-colonel retroactively amended and backdated a battlefield report to buttress the case against Khadr.
Even if Khadr did kill Sgt. Speer, he did so as a soldier, not a terrorist. There's little doubt that Ahmed Khadr was training his sons to be terrorists — the sort of people who blow up buses and restaurants, or who wear civilian clothing as they lie in wait to detonate explosives under vehicle convoys. But what Omar Khadr did on June 27, 2002 wasn't terrorism. It was participation in a military engagement — a fact that can't be changed merely by slapping a label like "unlawful combatant" on him.
Moreover, it was a military engagement fought on American terms: After U.S. soldiers sealed off the village encampment housing Khadr's cell, they prosecuted the siege with about 100 troops, some of them Special Forces, as well as Apache helicopters, F-18 Hornets and A-10 Warthogs. You can say that Khadr was fighting in an evil cause when he was captured, but you can't say that he was preying on the defenseless.
Even if you don't buy anything I've written above, Khadr's treatment still ranks as abominable. Let us assume that Omar Khadr actually threw the grenade that killed Sgt Christopher Speer; that he did so as a cold-blooded killer, not as a soldier; and that his status as a child combatant is irrelevant — in short, that Omar Khadr is a murderer. Well then, how do we treat murderers in Western countries? Answer: We put them in jail. We don't beat them; or move them from cell to cell every three hours; or terrify them with threats of pedophilic rape; or deny them appropriate medical care — all punishments that Khadr has endured — a litany of abuse so traumatic that, according to one piteous detail among many, he took to falling asleep at Guantanamo desperately hugging a Mickey Mouse book brought to him as a gift. In the space of six years incarceration, Khadr has endured more brutality than any ordinary jailbird would endure in 60.
That's punishment enough. Please bring Omar Khadr home.
This article was found at:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/07/15/jonathan-kay-free-omar-khadr.aspx
3 Jul 2008
Cult of Combat - The Lord's Resistance Army
Newsweek - August 21, 2007
As Uganda’s peace talks stutter along, children forced to fight for a messianic militia are trying to rebuild their broken lives.
by Andrew Ehrenkranz | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Some of the children have yet to reach puberty. But they are fluent in rattling off the acronyms of war (RPG, LMG, SAM, SMG) and explaining just how these weapons work. Ranging in age from 7 to 18, they acquired their grim expertise as a result of being kidnapped and forced to serve as soldiers and sex slaves for the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Still, says a social worker who identifies himself only as Tom, these are the lucky ones.
The children are among the few who have managed to escape captivity and seek a new start at rehabilitation clinics like this one, the Rachele Center, in the northern town of Lira. The war they were forced to fight in is complex, political, tribal and extraordinarily brutal even by African standards, led by a mystical rebel who inflicts grotesque carnage in the name of Jesus Christ and for the cause of the Ten Commandments. Over the last 20 years, the LRA has played a role in one of the continent's longest and least-known conflicts. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced as many as 1.7 million, about the same as in the more talked-about hostilities between a fundamentalist Muslim government and tribal rebels in the Sudanese region of Darfur. But the particular horror in Uganda's war lies in the fact that children are both victims and perpetrators of atrocity.
Among them is Nancy, who was 9 when she and her sister were kidnapped by the LRA from their home in the Gulu district of northern Uganda in December 2002. She was beaten, tied and given a heavy load to carry on her head. In her 20 months in captivity, she was rubbed with shea-butter oil. Her captors told her two things about this supposedly magical concoction: it would stop bullets and it would prevent her from finding her way home if she tried to escape. Nancy was taught to shoot and dismantle a machine gun and forced to fight against the Ugandan Army (UDPF). Every order was a do-or-die ultimatum. She was made to loot, abduct other children and burn down houses in displacement camps. In an ambush by the Ugandan Army, Nancy was rescued, but her sister was left behind in the south Sudanese bush.
It's impossible to purge such a past, but to start the process of healing, scarred children need to open up and tell their stories. "If it makes them or us vomit, it's all got to come out somehow," said the Rachele Center's Belgian founder, Els De Temmerman. Her book, "The Aboke Girls," whose profits have helped fund the center, chronicles the abduction of 137 girls from a Ugandan boarding school and the daring rescue efforts of the school's principal, Sister Rachele—the center's namesake. For some of these kids, expressing their experiences through drawings comes more easily than talking. It's a way to begin a dialogue with outsiders and also within their own minds. Their images scratch through the savage surface of this complex crisis.
The conflict they have fled is rooted in a colonial-era divide, when the British chose the bulk of their civil servants from Uganda's south and most of its soldiers from the tribes of Uganda's north. The Acholi and Langi, the dominant tribes in the north, comprised the country's military elite. When current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, the Acholi in the north feared retribution and a loss of influence without their traditional power base in the military. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by an illiterate former altar boy and self-professed fundamentalist Christian "prophet" named Joseph Kony, soon became one of the many armed militias and rebels fighting in Uganda. Lieutenants from the regimes of the dictatorial Idi Amin and his successor, Milton Obote, provided the military experience and firepower to make Kony's ragtag rebels a capable and cruel insurgent force.
In waging its guerrilla war, the LRA found children useful as pliant slaves in camp and remorseless fighters in the field. More than 30,000 have been abducted since the late 1980s. In the Ugandan countryside, fear of LRA raids after sunset forced thousands of besieged children to make "night commutes" from rural villages and internal displacement camps to bigger towns in hopes of finding safe shelter. In recent months, however, the prospects for an end to what residents of Ugandan's calm capital Kampala see as the war in the north have improved. The LRA once counted on the backing of the Sudanese government, which was fighting a war in southern Sudan, near the Ugandan border, against rebels of Sudan People's Liberation Army. In the cynical calculus of unconventional warfare, Kampala would back Sudanese rebels while Khartoum supported Ugandan ones. But the long-running war in southern Sudan ended with a peace settlement in 2005, even as the war waged by other groups in the west of the country—Darfur—heated up.
At the same time, the Sudanese government, under increasing pressure on other fronts, started to find its alliance with the LRA in Uganda a liability. The group's bizarre and horrifying zeal massacring the very people it claimed it was fighting to protect became known to the outside world. Sympathy for its cause among the northern tribes of Uganda dwindled, eventually leading to peace talks between the LRA and the Kampala government in the southern Sudanese city of Juba last year. Inevitably, the road to a lasting ceasefire has not been easy. The ongoing Juba discussions stalled and remained at an impasse until last month, when an agreement was reached to extend a truce forged last August and return to the negotiating table. However, sticking points remain, among them the LRA's insistence that the International Criminal Court drop outstanding charges against Kony and his commanders.
While the negotiations stop and start, the children at the Rachele Center are enjoying their chance to act like kids again. Social workers try to remove some of the most tangible reminders by encouraging the children to turn their backs symbolically on the past by throwing their clothes into a bonfire. Their painfully innocent drawings were also on the way to the trash until case workers casually showed them to a visitor during an office clean out. Though critical to therapy, most are discarded after the child starts to function again. Yet some, like one 15-year-old who had his fingers chopped off for refusing an order to kill while captive, have begun to dream of more idyllic pictures. Heralded as Rachele's most talented artist, the lanky boy stands proudly amongst a few of his colorful canvases outside of his dormitory, his smile revealing not a shred of self-pity. He's safe, free and able to go to school—and he knows that this indeed makes him one of the lucky ones.
This article was found at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/34687
As Uganda’s peace talks stutter along, children forced to fight for a messianic militia are trying to rebuild their broken lives.
by Andrew Ehrenkranz | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Some of the children have yet to reach puberty. But they are fluent in rattling off the acronyms of war (RPG, LMG, SAM, SMG) and explaining just how these weapons work. Ranging in age from 7 to 18, they acquired their grim expertise as a result of being kidnapped and forced to serve as soldiers and sex slaves for the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Still, says a social worker who identifies himself only as Tom, these are the lucky ones.
The children are among the few who have managed to escape captivity and seek a new start at rehabilitation clinics like this one, the Rachele Center, in the northern town of Lira. The war they were forced to fight in is complex, political, tribal and extraordinarily brutal even by African standards, led by a mystical rebel who inflicts grotesque carnage in the name of Jesus Christ and for the cause of the Ten Commandments. Over the last 20 years, the LRA has played a role in one of the continent's longest and least-known conflicts. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced as many as 1.7 million, about the same as in the more talked-about hostilities between a fundamentalist Muslim government and tribal rebels in the Sudanese region of Darfur. But the particular horror in Uganda's war lies in the fact that children are both victims and perpetrators of atrocity.
Among them is Nancy, who was 9 when she and her sister were kidnapped by the LRA from their home in the Gulu district of northern Uganda in December 2002. She was beaten, tied and given a heavy load to carry on her head. In her 20 months in captivity, she was rubbed with shea-butter oil. Her captors told her two things about this supposedly magical concoction: it would stop bullets and it would prevent her from finding her way home if she tried to escape. Nancy was taught to shoot and dismantle a machine gun and forced to fight against the Ugandan Army (UDPF). Every order was a do-or-die ultimatum. She was made to loot, abduct other children and burn down houses in displacement camps. In an ambush by the Ugandan Army, Nancy was rescued, but her sister was left behind in the south Sudanese bush.
It's impossible to purge such a past, but to start the process of healing, scarred children need to open up and tell their stories. "If it makes them or us vomit, it's all got to come out somehow," said the Rachele Center's Belgian founder, Els De Temmerman. Her book, "The Aboke Girls," whose profits have helped fund the center, chronicles the abduction of 137 girls from a Ugandan boarding school and the daring rescue efforts of the school's principal, Sister Rachele—the center's namesake. For some of these kids, expressing their experiences through drawings comes more easily than talking. It's a way to begin a dialogue with outsiders and also within their own minds. Their images scratch through the savage surface of this complex crisis.
The conflict they have fled is rooted in a colonial-era divide, when the British chose the bulk of their civil servants from Uganda's south and most of its soldiers from the tribes of Uganda's north. The Acholi and Langi, the dominant tribes in the north, comprised the country's military elite. When current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, the Acholi in the north feared retribution and a loss of influence without their traditional power base in the military. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by an illiterate former altar boy and self-professed fundamentalist Christian "prophet" named Joseph Kony, soon became one of the many armed militias and rebels fighting in Uganda. Lieutenants from the regimes of the dictatorial Idi Amin and his successor, Milton Obote, provided the military experience and firepower to make Kony's ragtag rebels a capable and cruel insurgent force.
In waging its guerrilla war, the LRA found children useful as pliant slaves in camp and remorseless fighters in the field. More than 30,000 have been abducted since the late 1980s. In the Ugandan countryside, fear of LRA raids after sunset forced thousands of besieged children to make "night commutes" from rural villages and internal displacement camps to bigger towns in hopes of finding safe shelter. In recent months, however, the prospects for an end to what residents of Ugandan's calm capital Kampala see as the war in the north have improved. The LRA once counted on the backing of the Sudanese government, which was fighting a war in southern Sudan, near the Ugandan border, against rebels of Sudan People's Liberation Army. In the cynical calculus of unconventional warfare, Kampala would back Sudanese rebels while Khartoum supported Ugandan ones. But the long-running war in southern Sudan ended with a peace settlement in 2005, even as the war waged by other groups in the west of the country—Darfur—heated up.
At the same time, the Sudanese government, under increasing pressure on other fronts, started to find its alliance with the LRA in Uganda a liability. The group's bizarre and horrifying zeal massacring the very people it claimed it was fighting to protect became known to the outside world. Sympathy for its cause among the northern tribes of Uganda dwindled, eventually leading to peace talks between the LRA and the Kampala government in the southern Sudanese city of Juba last year. Inevitably, the road to a lasting ceasefire has not been easy. The ongoing Juba discussions stalled and remained at an impasse until last month, when an agreement was reached to extend a truce forged last August and return to the negotiating table. However, sticking points remain, among them the LRA's insistence that the International Criminal Court drop outstanding charges against Kony and his commanders.
While the negotiations stop and start, the children at the Rachele Center are enjoying their chance to act like kids again. Social workers try to remove some of the most tangible reminders by encouraging the children to turn their backs symbolically on the past by throwing their clothes into a bonfire. Their painfully innocent drawings were also on the way to the trash until case workers casually showed them to a visitor during an office clean out. Though critical to therapy, most are discarded after the child starts to function again. Yet some, like one 15-year-old who had his fingers chopped off for refusing an order to kill while captive, have begun to dream of more idyllic pictures. Heralded as Rachele's most talented artist, the lanky boy stands proudly amongst a few of his colorful canvases outside of his dormitory, his smile revealing not a shred of self-pity. He's safe, free and able to go to school—and he knows that this indeed makes him one of the lucky ones.
This article was found at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/34687
27 Jun 2008
Canada accused of undermining international court
Canwest News Service - June 26, 2008
Could set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers
by Kathryn May
OTTAWA - In a bid to bring a peace deal to war-torn Northern Uganda, Canada may end up undermining the very credibility of the International Criminal Court that has been a key piece of this country's foreign policy.
International justice advocates say Canada appears to be quietly promoting a proposal to drop charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against notorious rebel leader Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, to help seal a peace deal that could end the brutal war that has ravaged Northern Uganda for more than 20 years.
A copy of an unclassified document that Canadian officials are said to have circulated to member countries of the UN Security Council says Canada is open "in principle" to the idea of Uganda asking the security council to defer the indictments against Kony and his band of commanders. Canada played an instrumental role in creating the court, based in The Hague, and the indictments against Kony are among the first it issued. Its president is Canadian Judge Phillip Kirsch.
Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign minister for the Jean Chretien government, said such a move undermines Canada's leadership in international justice and the "human security" approach to global issues. He argued it opens the door to impunity for Kony, who in his violent fight to bring in a government based on the Ten Commandments, kidnapped thousands of children and terrorized them to fight as soldiers in the war. Axworthy was a panellist here Thursday, discussing Canada's role in international justice at the official launch of the Canadian Centre for International Justice.
"If we let him and his chief commanders off the hook we will have set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers," Axworthy said.
"Using the judicial systems as a form of sanction and deterrent is a very powerful tool and I think that if the Uganda government and the Security Council give in to blackmail, they will set the cause of international justice back to where it was before (General Augusto) Pinochet or Idi Amin," said Axworthy.
Axworthy argued the proposal trades justice for a quick peace deal, but lasting peace will be impossible without justice for those who raped, mutilated, kidnapped and killed so many.
The peace negotiations in Uganda have been marked by a highly divisive debate over how to mete justice to Kony and his rebel leaders. Many have argued the ICC indictments have stood in the way of reaching a peace agreement. Thousands of people, displaced by the war, are still living in squalid camps and don't want to return to their homes until Kony signs the peace deal. They feel Kony will never surrender unless the ICC indictments are dropped.
Robert Fowler, a longtime diplomat who served as Canada's ambassador to the UN and personal representative for Africa for former prime ministers Chretien and Paul Martin, and current leader Stephen Harper, said Canada and the rest of the international community face a "Hobson's choice" in resolving the Uganda conflict.
"It's not easy. This is not a black-and-white situation. Neither choice is a good one," he said.
This article was found at:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=39c1b9f1-1d01-4ba9-aafb-bf5dc526cafb
Could set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers
by Kathryn May
OTTAWA - In a bid to bring a peace deal to war-torn Northern Uganda, Canada may end up undermining the very credibility of the International Criminal Court that has been a key piece of this country's foreign policy.
International justice advocates say Canada appears to be quietly promoting a proposal to drop charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against notorious rebel leader Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, to help seal a peace deal that could end the brutal war that has ravaged Northern Uganda for more than 20 years.
A copy of an unclassified document that Canadian officials are said to have circulated to member countries of the UN Security Council says Canada is open "in principle" to the idea of Uganda asking the security council to defer the indictments against Kony and his band of commanders. Canada played an instrumental role in creating the court, based in The Hague, and the indictments against Kony are among the first it issued. Its president is Canadian Judge Phillip Kirsch.
Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign minister for the Jean Chretien government, said such a move undermines Canada's leadership in international justice and the "human security" approach to global issues. He argued it opens the door to impunity for Kony, who in his violent fight to bring in a government based on the Ten Commandments, kidnapped thousands of children and terrorized them to fight as soldiers in the war. Axworthy was a panellist here Thursday, discussing Canada's role in international justice at the official launch of the Canadian Centre for International Justice.
"If we let him and his chief commanders off the hook we will have set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers," Axworthy said.
"Using the judicial systems as a form of sanction and deterrent is a very powerful tool and I think that if the Uganda government and the Security Council give in to blackmail, they will set the cause of international justice back to where it was before (General Augusto) Pinochet or Idi Amin," said Axworthy.
Axworthy argued the proposal trades justice for a quick peace deal, but lasting peace will be impossible without justice for those who raped, mutilated, kidnapped and killed so many.
The peace negotiations in Uganda have been marked by a highly divisive debate over how to mete justice to Kony and his rebel leaders. Many have argued the ICC indictments have stood in the way of reaching a peace agreement. Thousands of people, displaced by the war, are still living in squalid camps and don't want to return to their homes until Kony signs the peace deal. They feel Kony will never surrender unless the ICC indictments are dropped.
Robert Fowler, a longtime diplomat who served as Canada's ambassador to the UN and personal representative for Africa for former prime ministers Chretien and Paul Martin, and current leader Stephen Harper, said Canada and the rest of the international community face a "Hobson's choice" in resolving the Uganda conflict.
"It's not easy. This is not a black-and-white situation. Neither choice is a good one," he said.
This article was found at:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=39c1b9f1-1d01-4ba9-aafb-bf5dc526cafb
10 Jun 2008
The 14-year-old Afghan suicide bomber
The Independent - U.K.
June 10, 2008
Teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops
by Kim Sengupta in Kabul
The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan's feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.
news/world/asia/the-14yearold--
afghan-suicide-bomber-843535.html
June 10, 2008
Teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops
by Kim Sengupta in Kabul
The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan's feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.
Among the inmates: Shakirullah Yasin Ali; a small, frail boy, just 14 years old, arrested as he prepared to carry out a suicide bombing against British and American targets. "If I had succeeded, I would be dead now, I realise that," he said in a soft, nervous voice.
"But those who were instructing me said that if I believed in serving God it was my duty to fight against the foreigners. They said God would protect me when the time came."
It was a suicide bomber like Shakirullah who, on Sunday, claimed the lives of three more British soldiers in Helmand, bringing the total number of UK fatalities in Afghanistan to 100.
The Independent spoke to Shakirullah, a Pakistani Pashtun, one of the youngest ever suicide bombing suspects, after he was captured in a raid at the town of Khost in Afghanistan.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the prison run by Afghan intelligence, the NDS, Shakirullah said: "I do not know what is going to happen to me. All we were told was the British and the Americans were in Afghanistan and they were killing Muslims.
"All I know is what the mullahs told me and kept telling me, that the British and the Americans were against God," he said with his head bowed down, his hands twisting a handkerchief.
Shakirullah, one of four children of Noor Ali Khan, a farmer, lived at the village of Tandola in the Pakistani region of South Waziristan. He said his education was at a madrassa run by two imams, Mullah Saleb and Mullah Azizullah. About 50 students between 13 and 22 attended the school, where the syllabus consisted of learning the Koran by heart, interspersed with political lectures.
About two months ago, he finished a first course in Koranic studies. He was then approached by the two mullahs who told him that the time had come for him to serve God in Afghanistan.
"At first, I did not know what I was supposed to be doing, then Mullah Saleb said I would be striking a blow against the foreigners, the British and the Americans, and get justice for all the people being killed. I was told I must leave at once and they would talk to my family on my behalf. I wanted to see my mother and father but I was told that was not possible for security reasons. That upset me but I thought I will be seeing them again as soon as I got back. They said my family would get well paid for what I was doing."
On the way to Afghanistan Shakirullah said he was told by a mullah that his mission would involve driving a car bomb. "I said I did not know how to drive but they said they would teach me, they said I would not have to drive far. Mullah Saleb said it was too late to stop. He kept saying that to be a good Muslim I must fulfil my duty. I was missing my family but I did not know how to go back to my village and I did not know anyone in the area I could run to. There was nothing I could do except pray I would be all right and my family would be all right."
Shakirullah says he was driven across the border and taken to a house in the city of Khost. "There were a few more people there and the leader was a man they called the Doctor, he and Mullah Saleb took me for driving lessons and took me to sermons in the evening. The Doctor brought the explosives in two bags for the car and he was the one who made the bomb. I was told I would soon be ready to carry out my mission."
However, the car being prepared for the bombing, a Toyota Corolla, had stalled a few times while Shakirullah was being taught to drive and, on one occasion, he and the Doctor had been closely questioned by the police.
Forty-eight hours later, the house where they were staying was raided by Afghan and Nato forces. "I had been told by the mullah that I was ready to go, the time was right. But then they came during the night, the soldiers, and smashed down the doors. There were Afghans and foreigners. A gun was stuck to my face and I thought I was going to be killed. They dragged us all out and took us to a prison."
Shakirullah's attack may have been prevented but not that of the bomber who took the lives of Privates Nathan Cuthbertson, 19, Charles David Murray, 19, and Daniel Gamble, 22. They had been going to speak to local people when a bomber detonated an explosive vest strapped to his chest.
Last night, their families paid tribute to their loved ones. Pte Murray's family said: "David was the best son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin and friend any of us could hope for. Although his time with us was short, he lived every second to the full and taught us the meaning of life."
The parents of Pte Gamble said: "Dan died doing the job he was so proud to do, with the regiment he was proud to be part of. He was special because he had trained in the Afghan Pashtu language. He was special to his family and friends – a true hero in every sense."
Pte Cuthbertson's company commander, Major Russell Lewis, said he was "a talented, motivated individual. He always had a smile on his face and relished the challenges faced by the professional soldier. "
British victims of the latest suicide attack
Private Daniel Gamble
Daniel Gamble, 22, from Uckfield, East Sussex, joined 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment in 2006 and became his platoon's linguist, working to understand Afghan culture and society. His parents said he was proud of his job and regiment.
Private Charles Murray
Born in Dumfries and brought up in Carlisle, Charles David Murray followed a family tradition when he joined up. His father, grandfather and uncle were all in the forces. Pte Murray, 19, known as David, was serving as a rifleman.
Private Nathan Cuthbertson
The 19-year-old from Sunderland had been fast-tracked through the army since joining aged 16, and within a year of joining 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, he had passed the infantryassault engineers course, usually reserved for more experienced soldiers. He was his platoon's machine gunner.
This article was found at:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-14yearold--
afghan-suicide-bomber-843535.html
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