Congo - Plight of Girl Soldiers “Overlooked”
As the trial at the International Criminal Court of a Congolese rebel leader
approaches, some fear that the voice of girls forced into militias may go
unheard.
By Katy Glassborow in The Hague (AR No.81, 31-Oct-06)
While human rights
organisations welcome the fact that Congo militia leader Thomas Lubanga will
soon stand trial at the International Criminal Court for conscripting child
soldiers, some are concerned that the scope of the official charge is
inadequate.
They allege that girls who were kidnapped into Lubanga's Hema
tribal militia in Ituri province will not be able to give full testimonies at
the ICC hearings in The Hague because charges of sexual violence have not been
included in his indictment.
Thomas Lubanga Dyilo made history in March
this year when he became the first - and, so far, only - person to be arrested
by the ICC and imprisoned in its cells in the capital of the
Netherlands.
Lubanga, 45, is charged with "enlisting and conscripting
children under the age of 15 and using them to participate actively in
hostilities" against rival Lendu tribespeople. The scale of the inter-ethnic
slaughter in the remote, mineral-rich Ituri region, in the northeastern corner
of the sprawling Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, has been compared in
intensity, though not in scale, with that of the genocide in nearby Rwanda in
1994.
In an Ituri population of just over four million, the United
Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have been killed in internecine
fighting since 1999, while more than half a million have been forced to flee
their homes, encountering further violence in their flight.
While no one
is disputing that the conscription of children into armed groups is a grave
abuse that must be tackled, human rights groups and activists argue that the
additional problem caused by the presence of young girls in guerrilla armies is
being overlooked by the international community.
Beck Bukeni T Waruzi
works with a charity in the east and northeast of the DRC that rehabilitates
child soldiers, including those from Ituri's Hema, Lendu and Lendu-aligned Ngiti
militias.
Waruzi told IWPR that when former girl combatants - who often
have been raped and kept as sex slaves - hear there is a court in Europe called
the ICC dealing with war crimes they are disappointed to find it is not also
pressing charges of sexual violence.
“They feel that they are forgotten,
and the court is only concerned with boys,” said Waruzi, whose Ajedi-Ka/Projet
Enfants Soldats organisation is based in Uvira, on Lake Tanganyika, some 700
kilometres south of Ituri.
He said girls very specifically feel that
their exploitation as sex slaves has “broken their future … [as] they cannot be
married and are rejected by their communities”.
Lubanga’s next appearance
- after three earlier postponements - before the ICC court, in a confirmation of
charges hearing, is scheduled to happen on November 9. No one is expecting that
the charges in his indictment will be widened at this stage to encompass
allegations of sexual abuse.
The DRC government and World Bank agree
there are currently about 30,000 child soldiers in the Congo, long torn by a
cat's cradle of national and provincial wars that have taken more than four
million lives since 1998. An estimated 12,500 of these child soldiers are girls,
some as young as six-years-old, who become sex slaves. Peace was officially
established in the Congo in 2003, but militia warfare has continued unabated in
many parts of the vast country.
In a report entitled DRC: Children At
War, published in October 2006, Amnesty International claims that the presence
of large numbers of girls in armed groups has been “largely overlooked by the
government and international community”. The report said there is "systematic
abuse of these children through torture, sexual violence and ill-treatment". It
said commanders and male fighters often do not feel obliged to release the
girls, as they assume ownership of them, claiming them as their
“wives”.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38(3),
prohibits recruitment of children under the age of 15.
The DRC
government launched a nationwide programme after 2003 to coordinate disarmament
and demobilisation and to reintegrate fighters into civil society. However,
Renner Onana, a United Nations demobilisation officer who was on the programme's
drafting team, told IWPR, "We did not touch the issue of the girl soldiers, but
wrongly took them as the dependants of combatants." Regrettably, he said, "it
was not seen as a serious issue".
With an estimated 1,200 people still
dying every day in the Congo's unresolved regional conflicts, according to
International Rescue Committee mortality surveys, Waruzi said he is surprised by
the narrowness of the ICC charge against Lubanga. Many people in the eastern
Congo feel he is guilty of “grave crimes like killing, maiming, abducting, and
sexual violence”, said Waruzi.
Waruzi said he personally finds it
difficult to distinguish between the use of Congo's children as soldiers and
claims of rape and sexual exploitation, since the “only motivation for the
recruitment of girls is for use as sex slaves”.
Therefore, he said, he
is lobbying the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Argentinian-born Luis Moreno-Ocampo, to
press a separate charge of sexual slavery.
Other human rights
organisations, such as REDRESS - which helps victims of torture and has recently
produced an extensive report on child soldiers and the ICC - argue instead for a
charge of sexual slavery to be added to the already existing indictment against
Lubanga. REDRESS, with headquarters in London, argues this is necessary to help
communities understand that rape is a serious crime. Its report says rape and
sexual enslavement are “amongst the worst atrocities that children associated
with conflict endure”. Mariana Goetz, one of the main authors of the report,
told IWPR that “just prosecuting recruitment [of children as fighters] confirms
the social isolation and stigma that these girls are suffering from
now”.
Waruzi said that when former girl soldiers ask him about the charge
against Lubanga and whether they will be asked to testify, the best that he and
his co-workers can offer is "Maybe". Waruzi said girls had told him, “The whole
group was using us as wives.” He said he finds it “sad and hard” to explain why
the crimes they have suffered are not be taken into account by the far-away
court.
Veronique Aubert from Amnesty International said the solution may
not be to extend the current charge. Instead, she said, the ICC needs to make
sure quite separately to “arrest someone else for sexual violence and for
holding girls as sex slaves” in order to highlight the issue.
Gemma
Huckerby, gender issues coordinator from the Swiss international humanitarian
organisation Geneva Call, agreed, saying that girl soldiers must be treated as a
separate issue. “My worry is that if Lubanga’s indictment is just widened, these
aspects will not be focused on,” she said.
It is anyway likely to be
difficult for children - whether male or female - to give evidence against
Lubanga, because in large areas of Ituri he is still considered a hero and a
leader.
Waruzi said that to expect children to testify against Lubanga
is to “ask a brother to [serve as a] witness against his brother, which is not
acceptable in Congolese culture”. He said his concern is that protection cannot
be guaranteed by the ICC, even though children would be able to testify via
remote video link so as to avoid coming face to face with
Lubanga.
Christopher Hall of Amnesty International told IWPR that child
witnesses in such high profile cases require special protection in how they are
examined.
Alarm bells were raised at the UN-backed Special Court for
Sierra Leone, in Freetown, the Sierra Leone capital, where some indictments for
human rights abuses made it impossible for victims to testify in court. Michelle
Staggs, of the War Crimes Studies Centre at the Berkeley campus of the
University of California, attended sessions of the special court: she documented
a decision by the judges to make evidence of sexual violence inadmissible
because the prosecution had not specifically included counts of sexual violence
under the indictment. The judges said that including such evidence would breach
the accused’s rights, because the accused had not been given notice of these
counts under the indictment.
The ensuing wrangling between judges,
prosecution and defence meant that some witnesses were told they could not
continue with parts of their testimony, which included descriptions of sexual
violence by armed militias. In some cases they were removed from the court
proceedings altogether.
Judicial decisions of this kind can
re-traumatise victims or belittle the crimes they have suffered - something
no-one desires for girl soldiers from the DRC should similar decisions be made
by ICC judges.
In the case against Lubanga, 41 injured parties have
applied to participate as “victims” in proceedings at the ICC, including girls,
some of whom will double up as prosecution witnesses. Since counts of sexual
violence are not included in the charge against Lubanga, the concern is that
girl soldiers will be treated in the same way as women from Sierra Leone - that
they will be silenced and not able to give their testimonies.
The DRC’s
disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration, DDR, programme, launched with 200
million US dollars of World Bank funding, was designed to help fighters put down
their arms and return to their communities. Admitting mistakes in the initial
drafting of the programme, the UN's Onana said, "We wrongly considered girl
soldiers as dependents of male soldiers, so they do not have the same benefits
as boy soldiers." In some areas, fewer than two per cent of the children passing
through the DDR programme have been girls.
Funding has slipped away and
three years down the line the DDR programme is grinding to a halt. “This issue
of girl soldiers is still there, so we need more funding to deal with this
specific problem,” said Onana.
The DRC is also working hard to prosecute
war crimes nationally, in military civil tribunals, with NGOs and prosecutors
from UN tribunals criss-crossing the country to train Congolese lawyers in the
tricky art of conducting a fair trial. In March, Major Jean-Pierre Biyoyo, a
former Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, FARDC, commander,
was sentenced to death by a Bukavu military tribunal for the arrest and
detention of children, with his sentence later reduced to a five years’
imprisonment.
Amnesty International’s report said the Biyoyo trial may
have set an important precedent in the domestic prosecution of recruitment of
child soldiers. Onana echoed this sentiment, but said that more rape cases need
to be tried.
For girl soldiers to be seriously helped, communities need
to be educated about why the abuse the girls have endured is against both
international and national law. Onana said, "There is a need to educate
communities, because traditionally these girls are seen as dirty.”
Communities also often assume that girls are returning with HIV/AIDS,
which obviously decreases their chances of getting married. This may even lead
to girls voluntarily rejoining militias and resuming relations with soldiers so
that they can provide for the children they have given birth to as a result of
the rapes.
In an interview with America’s National Public Radio, the
deputy prosecutor of the ICC, Gambia's former attorney-general, Fatou Bensouda,
said another unfortunate dimension to this problem is whether the children of
girl soldiers can ever be re-integrated into their home
communities.
Sometimes even the young mother herself “has difficulty
accepting the child as a child she wants and loves”, said Bensouda.
Waruzi told IWPR that a major problem for Congolese trying to understand
the significance of the ICC to their lives is that they have absolutely no idea
how the court in The Hague works. “It is two different worlds, and there is a
lack of outreach and communication about the court,” he said. Only with greatly
improved public relations would people begin to understand the Lubanga
prosecution.
It is clear that the ICC needs support of the Congolese
people, because recent elections have proved that Lubanga still enjoys support
in and beyond Ituri. Waruzi said much more needs to be done by ICC officials to
educate communities about why their children - especially girls - are victims
and to help them to understand the appalling nature of the crimes these girls
have suffered.
Katy Glassborow is an IWPR reporter in The Hague.