Sierra Leone Rebels Forcefully Recruit Child Soldiers

The rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone is forcing children, including demobilized child soldiers, to join its ranks and engage in combat, Human Rights Watch said today. The rights group has documented abductions of children as recently as early May. "The RUF has forced many children to join its ranks in recent weeks, placing them on the front lines of combat," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "For child soldiers, the crisis in Sierra Leone is far from over." He called on all parties to the conflict in Sierra Leone to immediately stop the use of child soldiers and to release all abducted children and people under the age of eighteen.

Since taking United Nations peacekeepers hostage in early May, the RUF has forced many children, included demobilized RUF child soldiers who had laid down their arms, to join its ranks. Many other children have been abducted by the RUF in recent weeks to carry military equipment and looted goods, and female abductees are regularly raped. The RUF has a long history of using child soldiers.

Seventeen-year-old "Abubakar" (not his real name) told Human Rights Watch that he had gone to a camp for demobilized RUF child soldiers in Makeni in March 2000 after fighting as a child soldier in the RUF for four years. He described how the RUF regularly came to the demobilization camp to pressure children to return to the RUF, telling the children that they would be sold when they left the camp, or stating that the RUF had located their families and would help them reunite. On at least one occasion, RUF fighters came to the camp and told the children that the RUF would kill everyone in the camp if they did not rejoin the rebel army. Abubakar estimated that the RUF took at least fifty children out of the camp through the use of threats, false promises, and false rumors.

When fighting broke out in early May, Abubakar was forced to rejoin the RUF when he was abducted while walking near the demobilization camp in Makeni. "It was not my wish to go fight, it was because they captured me and forced me," he told Human Rights Watch, "There was no use in arguing with them, because in the RUF if you argue with any commander they will kill you." Abubakar took part in recent fighting in Lunsar, Rogberi Junction, and Waterloo. He and others were often forced to commit abuses. In Rogberi Junction, their commander ordered them to burn down the entire town after a counterattack on the RUF by government helicopters. RUF commanders also used looted U.N. vehicles to move looted civilian properties back to RUF bases. Abubakar finally managed to sneak away from the RUF and return to the demobilization camp, which was evacuated to Freetown soon after. On their way to Freetown, the large group of demobilized child combatants was harassed by the pro-government Kamajor militia as well as by the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), who beat them. Abubakar said the Kamajors got angry with the children for showing them demobilization documents, saying that the children were provoking them because it was known that Kamajors were not educated and could not read.

Fifteen-year-old "Foday" (not his real name) was abducted by RUF when he was eight years old and had gone to the Makeni demobilization camp after the Lomé peace accord. He told Human Rights Watch further details of the evacuation of the Makeni demobilized child soldier camp on May 23. He also said that RUF commanders regularly came to the camp to threaten and scare former child combatants into rejoining the RUF, and explained that the camp was evacuated early in the morning of May 23 because of fear that the RUF would attempt a mass abduction. On their way to Freetown, the eighty-six former child soldiers who left the camp were stopped by RUF and stripped of their possessions: Foday lost a new watch, his clothes, a radio, and some money. The RUF then forced Foday to join them to carry looted goods back to an RUF camp located twenty-seven miles away. He later managed to escape from the RUF, but was then harassed and beaten by Kamajors, who took away his remaining possessions and threatened to kill him until a commander intervened and stopped the abuse.

RUF forces have also abducted children to carry loads of looted goods and military equipment for them, and have abducted girls for the purpose of rape. Fifteen-year-old "Musa" (not his real name) was abducted from Port Loko during an RUF attack in mid-May, and forced to carry a heavy bag of salt for four days. He told Human Rights Watch that the rebels shot and killed his brother, twenty-year-old Lamina K., after Lamina complained that his load was too heavy. Musa showed Human Rights Watch a large bump on his head which he had sustained when he was beat by the RUF with rifle butts.

Rape of captured women and girls is routine. Twenty-year-old "Miriam" (not her real name), still nursing her five-month-old baby, was raped in front of her husband almost as soon as they were captured near Masiaka on May 21. She told Human Rights Watch that she was raped almost continuously by seven RUF fighters, including some as young as fourteen, over the next three days. Some of the girls raped after capture are very young. "Malikah," who told Human Rights Watch that she was ten but looked much younger, told Human Rights Watch that she was raped by an RUF rebel after being captured, and watched her twenty- year-old sister Mawa Kamara die after RUF rebels amputated both her hands and one foot. "Children face some of the gravest abuses in this war at the hands of the RUF," said Takirambudde. "The RUF specifically targets children for recruitment as child soldiers, forced labor, and sexual exploitation."

Source: Human Rights Watch

Two student protesters killed by police in Durban, South Africa

Last Tuesday, May 16, two students were killed at the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), when police opened fire on a group of protesting students at the campus. Michael Makhabane, a 23-year-old student from Ficksburgin in the Free State, died after being hit in the chest by a blast of pellets. Another student, Lala Ngoxolo, was also killed. A third student is said to be fighting for his life in hospital. Police have admitted that five students were injured.

The students were demonstrating against the de-registration of 517 of their colleagues who were unable to pay their school fees.

A report sent to the World Socialist Web Site quoted a UDW professor who commented: “Of course we don't expect much from the Durban police. After all it's no secret that the police control the drug trade in this city and it was just a couple of weeks ago that a young girl accused of shoplifting was brutally gang raped at the Phoenix police station.... Nevertheless we still don't expect the police to murder our young people like this.”

The murder of the two students took place as President Thabo Mbeki's ANC government has stepped up its repression against popular opposition to its pro-big business policies. Less than a week before nearly half the country's workforce went on strike and more than 100,000 workers marched nationally against growing unemployment. In Durban police fired tear gas at a crowd of protesting workers and students.

Source: World Socialist Web

AIDS in South Africa; A President Misapprehends a Killer

THE tone and substance of the letter was so peculiar that some officials in Washington thought it was a hoax. In a five-page letter to President Clinton last month, South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, argued that his country had to chart its own course in dealing with AIDS, including consulting those who challenged prevailing views on the causes and treatments of the disease. A ''campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism'' akin to ''medieval book-burning'' was keeping such voices from being heard, Mr. Mbeki wrote.

The letter was no hoax, and it touched off an uproar, in part because South Africa's democratic politics and advanced industry make it the natural leader in the fight against a disease that has devastated Africa. This status was acknowledged in the nation's selection to sponsor this year's international AIDS conference. Yet here was Nelson Mandela's anointed successor questioning many years of scientific research. Never mind that Mr. Mandela hardly mentioned the disease during his presidency. In the weeks since, many South Africans have engaged in a kind of psychoanalysis of the 57-year-old president they elected last year. Why did this cultured man, educated as an economist at Sussex University in England, take such a position? What does he gain from it?

Mr. Mbeki is the only African leader to have questioned the consensus theory on AIDS. He has, moreover, an embattled history with the disease, having first become embroiled in the scientific debate three years ago, when Mr. Mandela's cabinet backed research into Virodene, a supposed cure developed locally that turned out to be carcinogenic. Attacked by scientists, the health minister in Mr. Mandela's government, which Mr. Mbeki was virtually running, refused to back down, and it later turned out that stock in the company set up to make Virodene had been given to the ruling African National Congress. Virodene was discredited long before Mr. Mbeki began publicly questioning the causes of AIDS, so there seems little reason to believe that led to his present position. But it helped create the ill-will that exists between the scientific establishment and the A.N.C.

Last year, Mr. Mbeki stunned experts by questioning the safety of the standard anti-AIDS drug AZT, which the government has declined to distribute to pregnant women despite studies indicating that it could greatly reduce the transmission of the virus to newborns. Still, AIDS activists are shocked by Mr. Mbeki's refusal to accept the standard scientific model of the disease. Political analysts, meanwhile, say they can see little political gain for him or for his party (which took 66 percent of the vote in the 1999 elections) in his stance. Most see it as a personal decision from a man who, since his teens, has lived largely in exile, petitioning world leaders to help fight apartheid. They say that Mr. Mbeki's desire to reject Western thinking -- and condescension -- is strong, and his speeches have repeatedly called for an African renaissance. ''He is very keen on doing things in an African way and not just accepting the gospel from the West,'' said Raymond Louw, editor of the weekly newsletter Southern Africa Report. ''You hear this all the time.'' Wishful thinking about a cheap cure may also have played a part, some say, since South Africa isn't nearly rich enough to afford $15,000 AIDS cocktails, (or even $3,000 ones, if drug companies cut prices, as they indicated they might last week) for the 13 percent of the population that is infected.

Others believe that Mr. Mbeki simply couldn't help himself. He has repeatedly displayed a stubborn inclination to master technical issues in his own way, and in a highly personal speech recently he told of Internet searches with dictionaries at his side as he looked for information that might help him formulate his country's AIDS policies. Whether his current approach -- convening a ''What Causes AIDS?'' panel divided between orthodox AIDS researchers and those who believe it is caused by malnutrition and parasites -- will help or hurt his country is an open question. Heading the panel of 33 experts is William Makgoba, who runs South Africa's equivalent of the National Institute of Health. Mr. Makgoba strongly supports the standard model of AIDS, but said that bringing the dissidents ''into the tent'' will be a good thing.

MR. MAKGOBA believes Mr. Mbeki to be a ''very intellectual person'' who is trying to inform himself on a disease that is ravaging his country. He wishes, however, that Mr. Mbeki had informed himself in private, fearing that he will be classified ''as one of those African leaders who doesn't care about science or technology.'' Tom Lodge, a professor of political science at the University of Witwatersrand, says that Mr. Mbeki shows the personality traits of what he calls ''an interferer, not a delegater.'' It is a trait that has come up in other arenas as well, he says.

At the moment, Professor Lodge points out, Mr. Mbeki is shuttling back and forth to Zimbabwe, trying to ease the tensions over the violence that has broken out as supporters of President Robert Mugabe have seized white-owned farms. But Professor Lodge says Mr. Mbeki should let his foreign minister do the traveling. ''He is running up to Harare every two minutes like an office boy,'' Professor Lodge said. ''The AIDS issue is the same. Maybe he will learn the lesson that a head of state does not busy himself with details.''

Source: New York Times