-Why doesn’t the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to Northern Uganda, Mette Newth, right, a board member of HRH asked in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet yesterday. –The children are beaten into becoming unrecognisable monsters, capable of committing acts of violence your fantasy comes short of imagining. (31-JAN-06)

This article, written by HRH board member Mette Newth, first appeared in yesterday’s issue of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. It has been translated for publication here by HRH / Niels Jacob Harbitz. Photo of Mette Newth: Dagbladet.

Imagine you had to send your sons, turning seven and nine and your daughter aged 11 out walking every night before the sun sets to the nearest town for them to spend the night there, in relative safety. To get there, they have to walk along unsafe roads. They walk with many equally panic stricken, hungry and exhausted children, who, for yet another night, can evade kidnapping to become child soldiers, or slaughter.

Their fear is well founded. Every day, five children are abducted in Northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Since the conflict began twenty years ago, LRA commanders have stolen more than 30.000 boys and girls to become their frontline soldiers and wives. 85 per cent of the LRA are children. Every night, for many years, up to 40.000 children have fled to avoid being kidnapped.

You don’t know if your children will survive the walk and the night, or if they will manage the long walk back to school the next morning. But then again, you don’t know if you yourself will be alive either. For they prefer to attack after dark, sneaking into the villages, burning, slaughtering, stealing food and children before running away across the border to Sudan to their camps, protected by the government there.

The murderers who might kill you may come from your own neighbourhood, or they went to the same class or school as your children not long ago. Before they were kidnapped, they used to play. Like your own children, they had hopes and dreams. Then they were taken away by the rebels, and beaten into becoming unrecognisable monsters, capable of committing acts of violence your fantasy comes short of imagining. This way, the quantitatively modest band fighting the government held Northern Uganda captive for two decades, murdered and abused thousands, and driven 1,6 million people away from their homes and into IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps, camps that the Norwegian Refugee Council, who provide food and aid to most of them, describe as much too small, and a health hazard, too. According to FAFO, an independent Norwegian research institution, some 1000 people die in these camps every week because of violence, illness or malnutrition. In the camps, there are also LRA deserters and spies, informers and executioners who see to it that people live in fear of blood revenge from the LRA warriors.

Recently, Christopher Hitchens wrote an indignant article in Vanity Fair on his visit among Ugandas traumatised adults and children. Hitchens lets go of his so-called journalistic objectivity when he sides with his fellow human beings like this: “The Acholi people of northern Uganda, who are the chief sufferers in all this, have to suffer everything twice. Their children are murdered or abducted and enslaved and then come back to murder and abduct and enslave even more children. Yet if the Ugandan Army were allowed to use extreme measures to destroy the L.R.A., the victims would be … Acholi children again. It must be nightmarish to know that any feral-child terrorist who is shot could be one of your own.”

Hitchens’s painful question transforms this war from one of the endless African conflicts that we in the Western world barely manage to follow on TV, to a burning issue: Does this matter to you? In case you think no, why doesn’t it matter to you?

Uganda is far from the only country in the world that turns children into killing machines that either become cannon fodder, or are rescued, doomed to battle with the most terrible traumas for the rest of their lives. In 2001, Human Rights Watch reported that children are being used as soldiers in 33 countries. In countries like Angola, Burma, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Uganda both governments and rebels used child soldiers. In countries like Colombia, Peru, Mexico, India, Indonesia and the Russian Federation, children fight for opposition groups.

United Nations now estimate that 300.000 children fight for different kinds of armed forces, and the use of child soldiers have increased in line with the rapid development of light and easily handled arms. Children are often used as front soldiers, but also as live mine sweepers or suicide bombers, spies, informers or executioners. Needless to say, children living in war-torn areas, orphans and refugees and IDPs are the most vulnerable of all.

While the situation in Northern Uganda is not unique, it still deserves our absolute attention. The fanatical rebels’ abuse of the children is particularly evil, since the children’s passage rite of inclusion into LRA often will be to kill a family member or friend. Hence, they become a grotesque threat to their own. Furthermore, last year, the International Criminal Court in Hague issued arrest warrants on many of the LRA leaders. This, the rebels have responded to with increased violence against civilians and aid workers.

Uganda is one of the few African countries still hailed and supported by western governments, thereby also reflecting favourably on the aid policies of countries such as Norway. But as the Norwegian Refugee Council points out in its ongoing campaign for Uganda’s child soldiers; Uganda being one of our main aid cooperation countries, Norway has a particular responsibility to keep the peace talks we have taken part in facilitating alive.

On the rare occasion that the media focus on the children’s tragedy in Northern Uganda, the level of gruesome detail on what these children are forced to do is such that one prefers to flick on and forget, fast. Genuine empathy and indignation on behalf of the  victims of conflicts in Africa is a rare journalistic feat. Hence, when it appears, this kind of journalism is an immeasurable trigger of that unique human ability – still intact with those of us who haven’t lobotomised our conscience – to identify with the suffering of others, and question our own politicians and the world leaders as to why this terrible violation of human rights isn’t brought to an end. Why doesn’t the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child apply to these children? Because they are only children, and, moreover, a relatively small group of the world’s large quantities of poor children? Or is it because this happens so far away?

As a society, we tend to cultivate consolidating myths about children; like the ones saying that they forget fast and don’t understand the full extent of what they are subjected to anyway. But does anyone seriously believe that children can forget and grow out rape and murder? Many child soldiers are helped at rehabilitation centres like those in Uganda, but all are injured for life. Ask former child soldiers who live as refugees in Norway. They know the traumas they carry with them. Often without help.

Last year, the United Nations’ Security Council established a monitoring group to protect children in armed conflict, also against kidnapping for purposes of war. Only within the last decade, two million children have died in such conflicts. Since 2003, eleven million children are classified as IDPs (, i.e. refugees inside their own countries), while another 2,4 million children have been forced to leave their own countries for safety, again according to the UN. Human Rights Watch, one of the organisations who follow this situation closely, points out that few peace agreements acknowledge the existence of child soldiers, or contain suggestions for concrete steps to bring the children back to society. This must be a simple task for Norway to make sure the UN amends? This is also just one of many ways to put power behind the demand for the cynical waste with the world’s future using children as soldiers represent to come to an end. The countries who have the power to do this, but remain indifferent, must be considered accomplices to the crime.