Kampala
Senior UPDF officers could be arrested and tried in the United States for recruiting child soldiers under a new law passed by the Bush administration.
The Child Soldiers’ Accountability Act of 2008, which was signed into law by President Bush on Friday, covers all countries whose armies are known to have used child soldiers in hostilities between 2004 and 2007. According to reports by the UN and Human Rights Watch, the countries include Uganda, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Somalia and Sudan.
Also affected by the new law are senior commanders of the Lords Resistance Army, an outfit already blacklisted by the US government as a terrorist group, and whose senior commanders have been indicted by the International Criminal Court for a host of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
A statement from Human Rights Watch said the LRA has abducted more than 25,000 children over the past 20 years for use as soldiers, labourers, and sexual slaves. The law makes it a federal crime to recruit knowingly or to use soldiers under the age of 15 and permits the United States to prosecute any individual on US soil for the offence, even if the children were recruited or served as soldiers outside the United States.
The law imposes penalties of up to 20 years or up to life in prison if their action resulted in the child’s death. It allows the US to deport or deny entry to individuals who have knowingly recruited children as soldiers. It is, however, not clear which category of officers the new law is likely to affect.
While no senior officer in the UPDF has hitherto been charged over the use of child soldiers in any court, international or local, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his 2003 -2006 reports to the Security Council, cited the LRA, UPDF, and local defence as groups that have violated the international law prohibiting the recruitment and use of child soldiers.
Mr Annan told the Security Council that more than 1,000 children were mobilised into local defence units in Kitgum, Pader and parts of Teso region in 2004, and as of late 2007 had not been released.
Already, at least one senior UPDF officer is believed to have been banned from traveling to the United States over the UPDF’s role in the plunder of mineral resources from the DR Congo in the late 1990s.
Daily Monitor could not reach Defence Minister, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, or the Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima for comment on the latest developments as their known telephones were switched off. However, Defence State Minister Ruth Nankabirwa said UPDF officers could not be shaken by the new law.
“We are not bothered by the new developments because no one has ascertained that we recruit child soldiers,” she said.
“These accusations are not new and we have challenged our accusers each time they make such allegations to come and we ascertain together whether there are child soldiers in our army but they have failed to show up. We challenge them once again to come and establish,” Ms Nankabirwa said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Ms Nankabirwa said the UPDF has instead been rescuing abductees who had been turned into child soldiers by the LRA and rehabilitating them.
But a Child Soldiers Report of 2008, which was prepared by the Coalition to Stop the use of Child Soldiers, a London-based organisation formed by leading international humanitarian groups to stop the use of child soldiers in war, claims that the UPDF continued to hold children captured from the LRA for longer than the 48-hour limit specified by UPDF regulations, and to use children for intelligence-gathering or to identify weapons caches.
“In 2005, children who escaped or were captured or released from the LRA were reportedly pressured by the UPDF to join their forces and fight the LRA,” reads the report.
The Child Soldiers Report 2008 further alleges that children below the age of 15 continued to serve in Local Defence Units (LDUs) throughout 2007.
According to the report, local government officials said the under-18s were often lured to enlist in the army by the promise of pay and because of a lack of alternative educational or employment opportunities.
Ms Nankabirwa dismissed the contents of the report, saying the army used to chase away the young people who wanted to join the militia. “We chased them and insisted on letters from their local council leaders ascertaining their age. It is the same method we use when recruiting in the UPDF. We can not recruit children in the armed forces. We respect their rights,” she added.
In a statement released moments after President Bush signed the Act, Ms Jo Becker, children’s rights advocate for the watchdog Human Rights Watch, said the exploitation of children as soldiers persists in many armed conflicts because child recruiters are rarely held accountable. “This law tells military commanders worldwide that they cannot recruit children into their forces and then seek safe haven in the United States,” said Ms Becker.
SOURCE: Monitor
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