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Child soldier use rises globally, But Myanmar Deserves Its Own BBC Story

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[2 items from tsimonds via activ-l; 3+ years ago, the use of child
soldiers was said to be increasing globally, an NGO rights group
reported at the UN. This has been hghlighted especially in Africa by
international reporters. BBC reported  BBC to be on the rise "globally."
Today Myanmar/Burma comes in for special attention by good old Human
Rights Watch -- again reported by the BBC. 

There's talk of "travel restrictions" and an arms embargo, (again). No
one's talking yet about an oil & gas embargo ... if you shouldn't sell,
shouldn't you also refuse to buy, invest, or do business with them? 
Obviously the travel industry doesn't have the clout that energy
magcorps have. No one is talking either about  sanctioning Condi's
friends at Chevron or the French oil corporation Total, or investors in
Myanmar. 

Needless to say, none of these forcibly recruited child soldiers live
in Cuba. -NYTr]


BBC - Jan 16, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/3401991.stm


Child soldier use rises globally

By Adam Brookes
BBC correspondent at the UN

The use of child soldiers in war is continuing around the world and in
some African countries it has increased, human rights groups say.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says in Ivory Coast,
Liberia and the DR Congo recruitment of children increased massively in
2003.

It says a series of moves by the UN aimed at eradicating such practices
has made remarkably little progress.

It urges the UN to take tough actions against states using children in
war.

Travel restrictions

Soldiers, sexual slaves, labourers, porters and spies: children continue
to perform all those roles in conflicts around the world, a new report
by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says.

In Burma, it says testimony from former soldiers indicates that up to
20% of recruits into the government's armed forces were under the age
of 15.

The group - which includes Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
- - calls on the UN Security Council to renew its efforts against states
and armed groups that use children in war.

Among its ambitious recommendations is ending the flow of weapons to
those recruiting children, placing travel restrictions on leaders who
use children in their armies and ending military assistance to them.

The UN is due to debate the issue of children and armed conflict next
week.

The coalition's report is designed to prick the organisation's
conscience on a particularly intractable form of human rights abuse.

Published: 2004/01/16 07:29:53 GMT

                            ***


BBC - Oct 31, 2007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/7069920.stm


Burma army 'recruiting children'

The Burmese army is forcibly recruiting children to cover gaps left by a
lack of adult recruits, says a report by a US-based human rights
organisation.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says children as young as 10 are beaten or
threatened with arrest to make them enlist.

Burma has previously said it is working towards preventing the recruitment
of children by the military.

HRW has urged the UN Security Council to do more to punish Burma over its
alleged use of child soldiers.

False documents

The report, entitled "Sold to be Soldiers: The Recruitment and Use of
Child Soldiers in Burma" says there are thousands of children in the
Burmese military.

It claims that children are approached in public places by military
recruiters and civilian brokers who have been promised cash rewards by the
military.

The children are often beaten or threatened with arrest to force them to
enlist, the report says.

It is claimed that recruiting officers routinely falsify enlistment
documents to register children as being 18, the legal minimum age for
recruitment.

One child quoted in the report says he was forced to lie about his age
when he was recruited for a second time.

"When I said I was 16, I was slapped and he said, 'You are 18, answer 18.'

"I just wanted to go back and home and I told them, but they refused."

'Blatant recruitment'

The child recruits are deployed to battalions after an average of 18 weeks
training, the report says.

They are often reportedly sent into combat immediately, or forced to take
part in activities, such as burning villages, which can be classified as
human rights abuses.

Jo Becker, children's rights advocate for HRW, said Burma is "literally
buying and selling children" to fill the ranks.

"The government's senior generals tolerate the blatant recruitment of
children and fail to punish perpetrators," she said.

"In this environment, army recruiters traffic children at will."

Ms Becker said that the recent military crackdown had put off many of
those potential recruits who were not already deterred by poor conditions
and low pay.

"After deploying its soldiers against Buddhist monks and other peaceful
demonstrators, the government may find it even harder to find willing
volunteers," she said.

The Burmese ruling junta says it has formed a high-level committee to
address the issue of child soldiers.

However, Ms Becker described the committee as "a sham", saying the
government must address the issue head-on and demobilise all children.

International pressure

There remains widespread international concern about human rights in Burma.

Thousands of people are thought to have been detained following
September's military crackdown.

The UN Security Council is due to meet soon to discuss the use of child
soldiers in Burma.

HRW has accused the Security Council of not taking any action to address
the issue, despite stating repeatedly that it would consider targeted
sanctions.

The group has urged the UN to impose travel restrictions and arms embargos
if the situation does not improve.
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Even Fisk in a Huff: The Brits Love Saudi Money, But Not Advice

Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
[Heh! The Brits are profoundly disturbed that the rag-heads -- the
rich ones, whom they've been courting assiduously for aviation deals,
have the gall to visit their benighted isle and lecture them on
"terrorism."  After all, they are civilized. The Kingdom, as we all
know, is most definitely not.  Even Fisk is in a huff. "We supply
these people with fighter jets," he complains. You'd think the Brits
were giving them away. Suck it up, UK. Teach your politicians to act
civilized, and not play poodle to the likes of the Bush Reich in
their Crusades. Teach your Crusaders not to torture people in their
own invaded and occupied lands. Then talk to the Saudis about
civilization. The Irish most definitely remember the H-Blocks, which
Amnesty International also called torture, Mr. Fisk. -NY Transfer]

The Independent - Oct 30, 3007

King Abdullah flies in to lecture us on terrorism

By Robert Fisk

In what world do these people live? True, there'll be no public
executions outside Buckingham Palace when His Royal Highness rides in
stately formation down The Mall. We gave up capital punishment about
half a century ago. There won't even be a backhander " or will there? "
which is the Saudi way of doing business. But for King Abdullah to tell
the world, as he did in a BBC interview yesterday, that Britain is not
doing enough to counter "terrorism", and that most countries are not
taking it as seriously as his country is, is really pushing it. Weren't
most of the 11 September 2001 hijackers from " er " Saudi Arabia? Is
this the land that is really going to teach us lessons?

The sheer implausibility of the claim that Saudi intelligence could
have prevented the London bombings if only the British Government had
taken it seriously, seems to have passed the Saudi monarch by. "We have
sent information to Great Britain before the terrorist attacks in
Britain but unfortunately no action was taken. And it may have been
able to maybe avert the tragedy," he told the BBC. This claim is
frankly incredible.

The sad, awful truth is that we fete these people, we fawn on them, we
supply them with fighter jets, whisky and whores. No, of course, there
will be no visas for this reporter because Saudi Arabia is no
democracy. Yet how many times have we been encouraged to think
otherwise about a state that will not even allow its women to drive?
Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister, was telling us again
yesterday that we should work more closely with the Saudis, because we
"share values" with them. And what values precisely would they be, I
might ask?

Saudi Arabia is a state which bankrolled " a definite no-no this for
discussion today " Saddam's legions as they invaded Iran in 1980 (with
our Western encouragement, let it be added). And which said nothing " a
total and natural silence " when Saddam swamped the Iranians with gas.
The Iraqi war communiqu(c) made no bones about it. "The waves of insects
are attacking the eastern gates of the Arab nation. But we have the
pesticides to wipe them out."

Did the Saudi royal family protest? Was there any sympathy for those
upon whom the pesticides would be used? No. The then Keeper of the Two
Holy Places was perfectly happy to allow gas to be used because he was
paying for it " components were supplied, of course, by the US " while
the Iranians died in hell. And we Brits are supposed to be not keeping
up with our Saudi friends when they are "cracking down on terrorism".

Like the Saudis were so brilliant in cracking down on terror in 1979
when hundreds of gunmen poured into the Great Mosque at Mecca, an event
so mishandled by a certain commander of the Saudi National Guard called
Prince Abdullah that they had to call in toughs from a French
intervention force. And it was a former National Guard officer who led
the siege.

Saudi Arabia's role in the 9/11 attacks has still not been fully
explored. Senior members of the royal family expressed the shock and
horror expected of them, but no attempt was made to examine the nature
of Wahhabism, the state religion, and its inherent contempt for all
representation of human activity or death. It was Saudi Muslim legal
iconoclasm which led directly to the destruction of the Buddhas of
Bamiyan by the Taliban, Saudi Arabia's friends. And only weeks after
Kamal Salibi, a Lebanese history professor, suggested in the late 1990s
that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia might have been
locations in the Bible, the Saudis sent bulldozers to destroy the
ancient buildings there.

In the name of Islam, Saudi organisations have destroyed hundreds of
historic structures in Mecca and Medina and UN officials have condemned
the destruction of Ottoman buildings in Bosnia by a Saudi aid agency,
which decided they were "idolatrous". Were the twin towers in New York
another piece of architecture which Wahhabis wanted to destroy?

Nine years ago a Saudi student at Harvard produced a remarkable thesis
which argued that US forces had suffered casualties in bombing attacks
in Saudi Arabia because American intelligence did not understand
Wahhabism and had underestimated the extent of hostility to the US
presence in the kingdom. Nawaf Obaid even quoted a Saudi National Guard
officer as saying "the more visible the Americans became, the darker I
saw the future of the country". The problem is that Wahhabi puritanism
meant that Saudi Arabia would always throw up men who believe they had
been chosen to "cleanse" their society from corruption, yet Abdul
Wahhab also preached that royal rulers should not be overthrown. Thus
the Saudis were unable to confront the duality, that
protection-and-threat that Wahhabism represented for them.

Prince Bandar, formerly Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington, once
characterised his country's religion as part of a "timeless culture"
while a former British ambassador advised Westerners in Saudi Arabia to
"adapt" and "to act with the grain of Saudi traditions and culture".

Amnesty International has appealed for hundreds of men " and
occasionally women " to be spared the Saudi executioner's blade. They
have all been beheaded, often after torture and grossly unfair trials.
Women are shot.

The ritual of chopping off heads was graphically described by an Irish
witness to a triple execution in Jeddah in 1997. "Standing to the left
of the first prisoner, and a little behind him, the executioner focused
on his quarry ... I watched as the sword was being drawn back with the
right hand. A one-handed back swing of a golf club came to mind ... the
down-swing begins ... the blade met the neck and cut through it
like ... a heavy cleaver cutting through a melon ... a crisp moist
smack. The head fell and rolled a little. The torso slumped neatly. I
see now why they tied wrists to feet ... the brain had no time to tell
the heart to stop, and the final beat bumped a gush of blood out of the
headless torso on to the plinth."

And you can bet they won't be talking about this at Buckingham Palace
today.


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