Thomas Lubanga sentenced, but child soldiers still struggle
The International Criminal Court handed down its first sentence today, ordering warlord Thomas Lubanga to serve 14 years for the recruitment and use of child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the children of eastern Congo still need our attention.
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While this all can seem worlds away to those sitting in the US or Europe – troubles of a distant, mysterious, and violent land – we are closer to the problem than we think.
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Correspondent
Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.
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Children living in extreme poverty are our problem. So are children forced to be in wars.
Graca Machel, the wife of Nelson Mandela, longtime children’s advocate, and the former first lady of Mozambique (which saw its share of child soldiers during a decades-long conflict), wrote in the preface to the 2004 UN’s Child Solders Global Report that she didn’t know how to answer children who ask her when the world would actually act to protect them.
“.. the haunted eyes of child survivors ask all of us how we can live in a world where children can be brutalized and murdered as part of adult conflicts. I have no answer for these children. No reasonable or convincing explanation for why we have collectively failed to protect them from the atrocities of war. No justification for generations of broken promises.”
She continued: “It is heartening that the Security Council has condemned the use of child soldiers and outlined measures to end the practice. But this is not enough. Governments and armed groups must be held accountable for their actions, yet assisted to take concrete steps to get children out of conflict and back to their families.”
And then, read this part closely:
“This must include efforts by ‘the silent partners’ – those organizations, corporations and governments in Europe, North America and other parts of the world that provide military training and resources that assist waring parties in conflict zones. They must ask themselves how they can fulfill their personal, their human, and their State obligations to the care and protection of children while they continue to sell weapons and provide assistance to those shown to abuse children in their armed conflicts.”
This is us. Because these conflicts that seem very far away are often fueled, at least in part, by our addiction to natural resources. The poverty has more to do with global economics and our own choices than we would like to think. And the world-wide moral responsibility is huge.
The conflict in eastern Congo, for instance, is complicated and contested, involving a tinderbox of poverty, ethnic tensions, and valuable natural resources such as gold and coltan. But the role of international corporations, which have supported different sides in the conflicts to get better access to resources, has been well documented by rights groups. Other organizations have found bullets linked to the US, Russia, and other countries.
The international court’s decision today on Thomas Lubanga may well be celebrated. But more importantly, for parents everywhere, it should be a call to look globally and consider what we can do to fight some of the most crucial, desperate challenges to children across the world.
The answers are not easy, nor simple. But we must take responsibility to grapple with them.
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