wfn.org | Children must No Longer Be Targets of War, Says UN Official

[PCUSA NEWS <pcusa.news@ecunet.org>]

30-August-1999 
99291 
 
    Children must No Longer Be Targets of War, Says UN Official 
 
    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
 
GENEVA - Pointing out that 90 per cent of casualties caused by current 
armed conflicts are civilians, mostly women and children - compared to 45 
per cent in the Second World War and just 5 per cent in the First World War 
- a high-ranking UN official has pleaded with churches to help halt 
civilian casualties. 
 
    "We must not let this happen!" said Olara A. Otunnu. 
 
    Speaking on 28 August to a meeting in Geneva of  the World Council of 
Churches' (WCC) central committee, Otunnu, who is UN secretary general Kofi 
Annan's newly-appointed Special Representative for Children and Armed 
Conflict, urged the WCC to work with the UN and other humanitarian agencies 
to create "a zone of peace" around children, protecting them from armed 
conflict, ensuring that they are not used as soldiers, and guaranteeing 
that humanitarian aid reaches them when they are caught up in armed 
conflict situations. Hospitals and schools should also be banned as targets 
in armed conflicts. 
 
    Otunnu told the committee he hoped the WCC "will add its powerful 
voice" in support of the UN Security Council's ground-breaking resolution 
of 26 August "to save children from the scourge of war." 
 
    In a press conference after his address, Otunnu said that the 
resolution marked "the first time the [UN] Security Council has made the 
link between its peace and security concerns and the impact of these 
concerns on children." 
 
    The resolution was extraordinary, he added, because it came "not in the 
context of a specific case, but as part of a discussion of much broader 
human rights issues." 
 
    The resolution urges all parties to armed conflicts to stop targeting 
children; to take concern for the welfare and rights of children into 
account in post-conflict peace negotiations; to take special measures to 
protect children, especially girls, from rape and other sexual abuse; to 
ensure unhindered access of humanitarian aid to children caught in armed 
conflict situations, and to end the recruitment and deployment of children 
as soldiers in armed conflicts. 
 
    Otunnu, who praised the WCC for previous statements on the subject of 
children as instruments of war - including a resolution calling for the 
abolition of the use of children as soldiers, adopted at the 8th Assembly 
of the WCC last December - told the central committee that the 
proliferation of armed conflicts in which civilians, mainly women and 
children, were primary targets "is an unspeakable abomination." 
 
    Otunnu recited a litany of statistics to back up his accusation: in the 
past few years two million children have been killed in armed conflicts, 
six million have been maimed, 10 million have suffered severe mental and 
emotional trauma, and 20 million have been displaced from their homes. 
 
    The church must be involved in solving the problem, Otunnu said, 
because the "world turned upside-down" by soldier-on-civilian violence "has 
been brought on by a moral vacuum, a collapse of value systems that have 
heretofore protected children in armed conflict." 
 
    "We need spiritual renewal," Otunnu said.  "The church's role is 
crucial - to embrace all people and bring them together around values that 
unite rather than around doctrines and slogans that divide." 

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