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Fighting the Use of Child Soldiers with a List

by Dulcie Liembach, PassBlue February 11, 2012

The “naming and shaming” tool has been the most successful mechanism so far in the United Nations’ arsenal on ending the practice of child soldiers in the last 10 years, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for children and armed conflict since 2006. Yet pockets of child soldier use still elude efforts by the UN and human rights groups since the General Assembly passed a resolution in 1998 banning the practice.

A UN Studies Program panel discussion held at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs on Jan. 31 focused on child soldiers in a two-hour program titled “The Security Council and Its Human Rights Agenda: Children and Armed Conflict: New Tools to Fight Impunity.”

Led by Elisabeth Lindenmayer, director of the UN program and a former adviser to Kofi Annan at the UN, the panel featured Coomaraswamy, a former Sri Lankan human-rights lawyer; Grace Akallo, a former child soldier and founder of United Africans for Women and Children Rights; Jo Becker, advocacy director, Children’s Rights Division, Human Rights Watch; and Ralf Schröer, a political officer at the German mission to the UN. The program began with “Ana’s Playground,” a film showing children playing in a desolate park, witnessing shootings and the target of a sniper themselves.

Akallo spoke first on the panel, detailing her life as a child soldier. She was in high school when she was recruited in northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army, known as the LRA and headed by Joseph Kony, who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court and is being hunted by Ugandan troops with the help of US advisers. The LRA trained children as young as 6 years old, Akallo said, beating them as an initiation rite, threatening them with witchcraft and forcing them to kill civilians and other rebels, using AK47’s.

Life as a child soldier, Akallo said, was “worse than death itself.”