This posting starts with the essence of the presentation of the Austrian Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Gerhard Pfanzelter, and moves then to the article by Matthew Russell Lee on www.InnerCity.Press.com - these related to the UN Security Council open debate on “CHILDREN AND ARMED CONFLICT.” We had before one posting where The Permanent Representative of Israel lamented the fact that some use their own children as human projectiles in suicide bombings - these people obviously have no respect then for the children of the other. We picked the Austrian intervention because it is uncluttered with direct references to reality, and basically makes all the right requests for a world of sanity.

The Austrian presentation stresses that we have already on the books all the tools needed for a sane world - tools that prohibit and criminalize recruitment and use of child soldiers, as well as other abuses of children in armed conflict. We have already the tools for monitoring and reporting of abuse. The problem is that violations just continue without regard to the rules on the books. The Ambassador wants to see that rape and sexual abuse of children should also trigger automatically the requirement for monitoring and reporting mechanisms like it is for the use of the children as soldiers. He is appalled by the level of sexual and gender-based violence against children documented in the Secretary-General’s report. He makes clear allusion to the UN’s own forces, that were tainted, as we well know, with many accusations of sexual abuse.

He requests that child rights training should be an obligatory part of training of UN peace keeping personnel. THE EUROPEAN PEACE UNIVERSITY IN STADTSCHLAINING, BURGENLAND, AUSTRIA, is offering Specialization Courses on Child protection, Monitoring and Rehabilitation also for UN and EU personnel. Similarly, he expressed Austria’s interest in protection of women and girls, and asks for support to the Machel Strategic Review and the development of an Inter-Agency Child Protection Database for applicability in conflict and post-conflict situations.

All of the above is nifty, but then look please on The Inner City posting to see that not all are equal at the UN. Some get away literally with murder, while some that are not big enough, or influential enough, at the UN are doomed to stay as victims. Please - see the attached posting, and consider what can be done to bring reality based corrections into the UN deliberations for enforcing the already existing regulations - equally - for the strong and weak.
For one thing, we were appalled when after the presentation by the Ambassador of Israel, it was the Palestinian representative who spoke of those that do war hiding behind children. He surely meant not his own Palestinians but with straight face and impunity was probably talking of the Israelis. And what happened with troops from Sri Lanka that were returned from Haiti for misusing local children? Was there any reeducation process applied if there was no court action? What about the refusal of Karzai of Afghanistan to let UN look into child recruits by the Taliban? Will pacification intent over-rule looking into child-soldiers issues?