inside the glass house

UN resolution on child recruiting too soft for FM applause
NEW YORK -- The Ministry of Foreign Affairs may have been far too quick last week to praise the 15-member Security Council, the single-most powerful body at the UN, for a politically-weak resolution on child soldiers.
Since February, the Council has had a wide-ranging proposal on the negotiating table calling for rigid sanctions on countries and rebel groups, including the LTTE, for continuously abusing children in armed conflicts in clear violation of international law.

But the Council has been so sharply divided on the question of sanctions -- with the five permanent members, namely the US, China, Britain, Russia and France, trying to protect their own political, military and economic interests -- that it opted to set up a "comprehensive monitoring and reporting mechanism" instead of punishing child recruiters.

The tame resolution was clearly a political cop-out -- notwithstanding the UN characterization of it as a "major step forward" to "eventually" punish child recruiters.

The foreign ministry press release last week sounded equally confident: "the resolution calls for the eventual imposition of targeted and graduated sanctions against offending parties (read: LTTE)". But that eventuality may never come -- or perhaps be a long way off.

Judging by the mood of the Security Council -- which has strongly resisted economic and military sanctions on Sudan despite the continuing genocide in Darfur -- child recruiters may still avoid the axe. Jo Becker, advocacy director of the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch who has made several critical statements on LTTE's child recruitment, was not jubilant either.

"We are disappointed that the Council has not yet acted to impose targeted measures such as arms bans against governments and groups that are well-known to recruit and use child soldiers," she said last week, hours after the resolution was unanimously adopted.

"However, we hope that the new working group established by the Council will take continuing violations seriously and strongly recommend such measures to the Council," she added. If the Council had acted more aggressively, it was expected to approve a set of "targeted measures" punishing the offenders, not postponing penalties.

These proposed measures included travel restrictions on government and rebel leaders guilty of recruiting child soldiers; imposition of arms embargoes; a ban on military assistance; restrictions on the flow of financial resources; and the exclusion of governments and insurgent leaders from any governance structures and amnesty provisions.

But nearly six months after discussing these "targeted measures", the Council jettisoned the proposal, hoping to discuss it another day in another year.

Not surprisingly, Olara Otunnu, the UN Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, described the adoption of the resolution as "truly a historical development." Clearly, he had no other choice. As a senior UN official, he has no right either to criticize or challenge the judgement or non-judgement of the Security Council.

Otunnu said the Security Council's special Working Group, consisting of all 15 members, will review reports and action plans, and "consider targeted measures against offending parties, where insufficient or no progress has been made."

He picked and chose his words carefully: the Council will CONSIDER targeted measures. But there was no promise to impose them, at least not yet. In a report to the Security Council last February, Otunnu also listed 17 "situations of grave concern" relating to children, and also named 54 offending parties, including governments and rebel groups.

The 54 included either government forces or rebel groups -- or both in some cases -- in countries such as Burundi, Cote d'Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Colombia, Myanmar, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Uganda.

The list also included "non-state armed groups" including the Lord's Resistance Army of Northern Uganda, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, paramilitary and guerrilla forces in Colombia, as well as government forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burma.

And more importantly, there is another aspect to the Security Council resolution that has been hidden from public view: it gives the LTTE a toehold on the UN.

Although successive governments in Sri Lanka have made it a deliberate policy to keep the LTTE out of the UN -- as has India on the Kashmir issue -- the new Security Council resolution virtually puts an end to this embargo on the Sri Lankan rebel group.

With the new monitoring mechanism approved by the Security Council, the UN now has a legitimate right to start a dialogue with the LTTE. And LTTE leaders, in turn, can seek a dialogue with the UN to provide responses to future charges on child recruitment.

Conceivably, the LTTE may even have a backdoor channel now to bring the political situation in Sri Lanka to the negotiating table in the Security Council. Was the government conscious of this possible political fallout? And was it taken for a ride?

Back to Columns