Jail for warlords urged at children rights conference

WINNIPEG (Reuters) -- Some of the world's foremost defenders of children caught in the horror of adult wars exhorted world diplomats Saturday to prosecute warlords and sought to promote dialogue as an alternative to conflict.

"There is never an acceptable excuse in sacrificing children," said Graca Machel, author of a groundbreaking study on the effects of war on children and wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela.

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War-Affected Children Conference

"We must end this impunity for crimes against children," she told participants at the conference on War-Affected Children, more than 50 of whom are foreign ministers.

The ministers, representatives of about 120 nations, young people from the four corners of the globe and non-government organizations have been meeting all week in Winnipeg with the intent of adopting an agenda Sunday to safeguard children in war.

The agenda from the conference, co-sponsored by Canada and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), will be presented for acceptance at the United Nations Special Session on Children in September 2001.

"We have a responsibility. We can't say it's not our business," Machel told the ministers -- including officials from war-torn Sierra Leone, Sudan and Angola.

Studies, which began with Machel's 1996 report, paint a horrifying picture of millions of children who -- when they survive a war -- lose limbs, are raped or kidnapped to serve as hostages or soldiers, and lose parents and family.

Machel said governments have started to view children as separate entities when evaluating the cost of conflict, but she said more needed to be done.

She asked the ministers to imagine how they would react if their own children were caught in armed conflict.

"I'm speaking because I'm a mother. You're also mothers and parents," she said, adding that many nations frequently aided rebel leaders by giving them safe haven.

The conference has been spearheaded by Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy, who helped lead the world-wide push to ban anti-personnel land mines and to establish an international court to prosecute war criminals.

"Now it's time to take what's come out of these meetings and turn it into public policy," Axworthy said. "The course is clear from Winnipeg in September 2000 to New York in 2001."

The conference has not been without controversy, with the invitation of Sudanese Foreign Minister Ismail Osman, whose country has been accused of allowing abducted children from northern Uganda to be trained as soldiers in Sudan.

Olara A Otunnu, a U.N. undersecretary general and a special representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, called for the immediate release of all children abducted in northern Uganda.

"How will we explain to these children and women that their cries and agonies have been met with studied indifference," he said, adding that laws and protocols that exist on paper in many countries need to be put into action.

The notoriously violent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the north of Uganda and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) in the west have kidnapped more than 2,000 children.

Otunnu also demanded an immediate halt to trading in "war diamonds" in Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has turned those countries into war zones.

The recommendations by Otunnu and other experts on the impact of war on children were presented to diplomats Saturday but the ministerial report is expected to include less lofty and specific recommendations when and if it is released as scheduled Sunday.

Several countries are reported to object to a document that would target individual organizations or nations as abusing children's rights and there are said to be objections to an international study on the trade in small weapons.

Machel downplayed the significance of potential differences between the experts' and ministers' reports. "You would find very few occasions in which you can get everyone to agree, even on an issue as compelling as child rights," she told reporters.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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