At UNICEF, Child Soldiers Counted But Not Reported, Karim like Kony Falls Through Political Crack
By Matthew Russell Lee
Inner City Press
October 17, 2007
UNITED NATIONS, October 17, updated Oct. 18 -- While the UN system says that the recruitment of child soldiers is one of the worst crimes, for which there should be no impunity, the current system allows one arm of the UN, its children's agency UNICEF, to count a militia leader's child soldiers without passing the information to the enforcement arm, the International Criminal Court. At a UN press conference on Wednesday, UNICEF's deputy director Hilde Johnson said that UNICEF must remain at arm's length from the ICC, otherwise UNICEF's ability to stay in countries and help children would be jeopardized.
Radhika Coomarswamy, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict (SRSG-CAAG) said that her Office could be housed in UNICEF, except that if UNICEF veers from humanitarian into advocacy (or in this case criminal justice) work, it could be thrown out of countries. But the reporting, for now, is to the Security Council's Working Group on CAAG, which Ms. Johnson referred to, quite correctly, as the "political track of the UN." Video here, from Minute 55:04.
Inner City Press asked about militia leader Peter Karim in the Congo, who took seven UN peacekeepers hostage and, by UNICEF's detailed count, recruited many child soldiers. Now Karim is a colonel in the Congolese Army. What has the Security Council Working Group done about this? Nothing, apparently. As with the ICC indictments of Ahmad Harun in Sudan, and Joseph Kony in Uganda, the exigencies of politics trump the enforcement of most of the ICC's few indictments.
