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The condition of the majority of children in the Congo is very miserable. They live in poverty on the barren earth, and they are aggravated by the necessity for war. The worst condition suffered by the army instead of girls. Not only forced by the rebel army, they also recruited by the national army.

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said, little girls who were recruited to become soldiers are in a very vulnerable condition and prone to become sex slaves. They are not easily released by the army and national rebels. They are used as laborers, troops and sex slaves. For several months the girls become victims of violence and rape. UNICEF says only 20 percent of the children were freed. They are currently undergoing treatment performed by several of world agencies and organizations that concern to children and women problem. UNICEF continued to make efforts to end the use of child soldiers in the war including the law application for recruiters of women child soldiers with 20-year prison.  However, the fact show the opposite because while in the duty, national army to come to settlement to recruit children.

Currently there are about 250,000 child soldiers are serving in various conflict regions around the world. This data is really miserable, isn’t it?

Since 2004, more than 36,000 children have been rescued from the Congo army and rebel groups, particularly in the eastern region. In 2000, nearly 6,000 children were freed out but only 1,222 of them were girls. The conditions of the girls were really bad because only a few number that were released.  UNICEF representative said that “all children, especially little girls who associated with the national army and the rebels suffered trauma. They need very special care. It is important to bring them back to normal lives as quickly as possible “.

The UN reported more than 8,000 girls were raped in eastern Congo in 2009. Ethnic Hutu Rwanda rebels, – Force Democratiques de Liberation du Rwanda (FDLR)-,  the perpetrators of genocide since 1994 is part who have to responsible for the case, but unfortunately, the national army are also doing sexual harassment.

Despite having one of the largest war victim populations in Asia, Afghanistan does not have a law on how to deal with hundreds of thousands of war widows, orphans and disabled

Ahmad Wali died in a bomb blast in Kandahar city on 25 August and Samim was killed in a suicide attack in Kabul on 15 September. Both men left grieving families with little capacity to cope on their own.

We could not afford to pay the rent so we left our old home and have moved into a small room outside the city, said Samims eldest son, Arif.

My children cannot go to school any more because we cannot afford their education, said Walis widow, Pashtana.

Both families have found it increasingly difficult to meet their food needs: We eat whatever we can find but wait for Gods mercy when there is no food, said Pashtana.

We dont receive a single dollar from the government to help war victims and their families, Suraya Paikan, deputy minister for Labour, Social Affairs and Martyrs & Disabled, told IRIN, adding that tens of thousands of victim households were registered with her department.

The office of the president told IRIN that in the last 18 months over 2,800 condolence payments (US$2,000 each) had been made to families that had lost a family member in the war, and 1,700 sympathy payments ($1,000) had been distributed to people wounded in the conflict.

However, the presidents condolence payments are ad hoc and authorized only for specific families – mostly those affected by military operations by pro-government forces, officials said.

Wali and Samims families said they had received no support from the government or aid agencies apparently because both men were killed in explosions allegedly perpetrated by anti-government forces.

No laws

Despite having one of the largest war victim populations in Asia, Afghanistan does not have a law on how to deal with hundreds of thousands of war widows, orphans and disabled.

There is a lack of almost everything – from budget, to capacity, to political commitment and to laws and rules, Paikan said.

Noor-ul-Haq Ulomi, a member of the National Assembly who served the Soviet-backed government in the 1980s, accused the international community and the current Afghan government of failing to heed the plight of war victims.

In the past the [Soviet-backed] government distributed free land and apartments, [making available] education facilities for orphans, and employment for widows and disabled people, but the existing government has done nothing compared to what had been done in the past, he said.

Tiny welfare payments

The families of about 100,000 government employees, police officers, soldiers and Mujahedin fighters killed in fighting between 1979 and 2001 have been registered at the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Martyrs & Disabled (MoLSAMD), but assistance is minimal: With funds from the World Bank the government pays up to $12 monthly (40 US cents a day) to each family.

Government officials acknowledge that the real number of victim families is much higher but say they cannot help all of them.

Some beneficiaries said the monthly payments they received could not meet their needs for a single day, and also criticized the payment process as corrupt and bureaucratic.

The main weaknesses of the current social protection programmes include lack of well-designed targeting instruments, poor coordination across programmes, poor budgeting, and weak institutional and administrative capacity, the World Bank said in a statement on 15 October. The statement also said the Bank would spend $7.5 million in the next four years to strengthen the capacity of MoLSAMD and help develop its welfare programmes.

More war victims

Meanwhile, more families are becoming victims of the fighting: The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) recorded 2,118 civilian deaths in 2008, compared to 1523 in 2007.

In 2009 UNAMA recorded 1,500 civilian casualties between January and August, with August being the deadliest month since the beginning of 2009. These figures reflect an increasing trend in insecurity over recent months and in elections-related violence, said a recent report to the Security Council by the UN Secretary-General.

Almost three times as many civilian deaths (68 percent) were attributed to anti-government elements activities than to pro-government forces (23 percent). The most deadly tactics used and which accounted for the largest number of civilian casualties in the conflict to date were attributable to planted improvised explosive devices; suicide attacks carried out by anti-government elements accounted for 39.5 percent of fatalities. Air strikes by pro-government forces accounted for 20 percent of fatalities, the report said.

( _http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/rawanews.php?id=1279 )

Martin Wolk

One thing is certain about the Iraq war: It has cost a lot more than advertised. In fact, the tab grows by at least $200 million each and every day.

In the months leading up to the launch of the war three years ago, few Bush administration officials were willing to comment publicly on the potential costs to the United States. After all, no cost would have been too high if the United States faced an imminent threat from an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction, the war’s stated justification.

In fact, the economic ramifications are rarely included in the debate over whether to go to war, although some economists argue it is quite possible and useful to assess potential costs and benefits.
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In any event, most estimates put forward by White House officials in 2002 and 2003 were relatively low compared with the nation’s gross domestic product, the size of the federal budget or the cost of past wars.

White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was the exception to the rule, offering an “upper bound” estimate of $100 billion to $200 billion in a September 2002 interview with The Wall Street Journal. That figure raised eyebrows at the time, although Lindsey argued the cost was small, adding, “The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy.

U.S. direct spending on the war in Iraq already has surpassed the upper bound of Lindsey’s upper bound, and most economists attribute billions more in indirect costs to the war effort. Even if the U.S. exits Iraq within another three years, total direct and indirect costs to U.S. taxpayers will likely by more than $400 billion, and one estimate puts the total economic impact at up to $2 trillion.

Back in 2002, the White House was quick to distance itself from Lindsey’s view. Mitch Daniels, director of the White House budget office, quickly called the estimate “very, very high.” Lindsey himself was dismissed in a shake-up of the White House economic team later that year, and in January 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the budget office had come up with “a number that’s something under $50 billion.” He and other officials expressed optimism that Iraq itself would help shoulder the cost once the world market was reopened to its rich supply of oil.

Those early estimates struck some economists as unrealistically low. William Nordhaus, a Yale economist who published perhaps the most extensive independent estimate of the potential costs before the war began, suggested a war and occupation could cost anywhere from $100 billion to $1.9 trillion in 2002 dollars, depending on the difficulty of the conflict, the length of occupation and the impact on oil costs.

The most current estimates of the war’s cost generally start with figures from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, which as of January 2006 counted $323 billion in expenditures for the war on terrorism, including military action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just this week the House approved another $68 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would bring the total allocated to date to about $400 billion. The Pentagon is spending about $6 billion a month on the war in Iraq, or about $200 million a day, according to the CBO. That is about the same as the gross domestic product of Nigeria.

Scott Wallsten, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, put the direct cost to the United States at $212 billion as of last September and estimates a “global cost” of $500 billion to date with another $500 billion possible, with most of the total borne by the United States.

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By Fred Kaplan

Imagine it’s early 2003, and President George W. Bush presents the following case for invading Iraq:

We’re about to go to war against Saddam Hussein. Victory on the battlefield will be swift and fairly clean. But then 100,000 U.S. troops will have to occupy Iraq for about 10 years. On average, nearly 1,000 of them will be killed and another 10,000 injured in each of the first 5 years. We’ll spend at least $1 trillion on the war and occupation, and possibly trillions more. Toppling Saddam will finish off a ghastly tyranny, but it will also uncork age-old sectarian tensions. More than 100,000 Iraqis will die, a few million will be displaced, and the best we can hope for will be a loosely federated Islamic republic that isn’t completely in Iran’s pocket. Finally, it will turn out that Saddam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor ties to the planners of 9/11. Our intervention and occupation will serve as the rallying cry for a new crop of terrorists.

It is extremely doubtful that Congress would have authorized such a war or that the American people would have shouted, “Bring it on!”

Some will protest that this counter-scenario is unfair. Nobody at the time predicted all of these outcomes (though several predicted some of them); Bush can’t be blamed for the unforeseen consequences of (let us stipulate) a well-intentioned action.

However, toting up the war’s extravagant costs against its meager (and still-speculative) gains is a valid way to gauge the larger question: Was the invasion worth launching? Was it a good idea? And the war must be appraised not as some abstract vision of an ideally waged war but rather as the actual, existing war that the Bush administration planned and executed.

The disastrous consequences that have been unfolding plainly over the past five years are not “side effects” of this war but rather the direct, head-on results. For example, it’s an evasion to lament that, had then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld listened to the Joint Chiefs and sent twice as many troops, the war would have gone differently. Maybe so, but Rumsfeld wasn’t interested in waging that kind of war. He saw the war not so much as a fight about Iraq as a demonstration of a new style of warfareknown as “military transformation” or “the revolution in military affairs”that signaled how America would project power in the post-Cold War era. He saw, not incorrectly, a turbulent world of emerging threats, some in remote areas inaccessible from U.S. bases. The large, lumbering armies of old were not so suitable for such conflicts. Hence his emphasis on small, lightweight units of ground forcesfast to mobilize, easy to sustainand superaccurate bombs and missiles to hit targets that only heavy artillery could destroy in decades past. With the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan conflict before it), he wanted to send rogue regimes and other foes a message: Look what we can do with one hand tied behind our back. If we can overthrow Saddam (and the Taliban) so easily, we can overthrow you, too.

It is no surprise, then, that Rumsfeld rejected the argument, made by several Army and Marine generals, that whatever happens on the battlefield, we’ll need a few hundred thousand troops to impose order and help form a new Iraq. A large, lengthy occupation would have nullified his whole concept of new-style warfare and its vision of 21st-century geopolitics.

In other words, it is not the case, as many critics charge, that Rumsfeld “miscalculated” how many troops would be needed for the mission of stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. Rather, he wasn’t interested in that mission. In a National Security Council meeting shortly before the invasion, he insisted that the Pentagon, not the State Department, should take charge of planning for postwar Iraqbecause he wanted to ensure that there would be no such planning (and, indeed, there wasn’t).

A stronger case could be made that the occupation would have gone better had L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, not issued (on whose orders, we still don’t know) the directives that barred all Baathists from government jobs and disbanded the Iraqi armythus alienating all Sunnis at a moment when reconciliation was vital and putting tens of thousands of armed young men out on the streets, angry and unemployed.

Still, it is unlikely that, even without the directives, a foreign occupier could have staved off sectarian violence for long. The majority Shiites would have naturally taken over the Baghdad government. The Sunnis, a minority accustomed to running things, would have rebelled. Holding early elections in the provincial districtsforming a federal republic from the bottom upmight have eased the factions into power more gradually, enabled them to make adjustments at each stage. We will never know. But again, this was not the way that Bush chose to go.

There is yet another way to assess the war: What if Saddam Hussein had not been toppled? Would Iraq be better or worse off? Would the Middle East be more or less stable, the United States safer or in greater danger?

(_http://www . slate . com / id / 2186850/)

by Charlayne Hunter-Gault

The war ended in 2002, but the legacy of child soldiers continues. The struggle for reconciliation in the new Angola includes brothers Feliciano and Jerimias Salamungo, who fought on opposing sides until they met by chance after a 22-year separation.

Feliciano Salamungo was 11 years old when he was forced to join the fight.

It was a day like any other. Feliciano was walking home from school, as oblivious to the scorching Angolan sun as he was to the men lurking in its shadows.

“In the middle of the way, I met a UNITA patrol. I was taken by them,” Feliciano recalled. “I was frightened. I was not expecting anything like that. Suddenly, there were troops asking me to join the group.”

Feliciano had no choice but to followfor the next two decades.

“We were obliged to walk a long way,” he said. “We reached unknown areas. We didn’t have any idea where we were living. It was living in the middle of the bush, like a strange land.”

That got stranger all the time.
“You never have a permanent home. You are here today. Two hours later, you move. Sometimes you have to sleep under trees. Sometimes you have to sleep in rivers, in water.”

‘Several Times I Cried’
Not yet a teenager, Feliciano was forcibly conscripted into a brutal civil war that started before he was born and made a mockery of the former Portuguese colony’s independence in 1975. As the liberation movements that fought together for freedom fractured, Jonas Savimbi’s guerrilla movement known as UNITA retreated to the bush.

Despite intermittent attempts at peace, the war went oneventually claiming the lives of more than 1.5 million Angolans. Landmines maimed countless numbers of innocent men, women, and children. Pitched battles that knew no boundaries rendered hundreds of thousands homeless.

Eleven-year-old Feliciano had no idea why he was taken or why the guerrillas who took him were fighting. He just knew he had to do what he was told.
“Otherwise, your life could be in danger,” he said. “I saw people being whipped … people being sent to distant areas…. When there was physical punishment, we were invited to witness. We were told that if you disobeyed, this could happen to you.”

“When there was physical punishment, we were invited to witness. We were told that if you disobeyed, this could happen to you.”
map of angola
“I would like to see my daughters have a different life from the one I’ve had so far….”
Jerimias Slamungo with Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Charlayne Hunter-Gault pictured with Jerimias Salamungo at a camp for demobilized UNITA guerrillas and their families in Kuito, Angola. Salamungo is a former government soldier whose younger brother was forced to fight for the rebels. Photo by Reese Erlich.

The US Role
UNITA became known for its tactics of kidnapping whole villages and attacking civilian supporters of the government. The United States and apartheid South Africa backed UNITA on the grounds it was fighting Soviet expansion in Africa.

Feliciano recalled the support UNITA got from the United States.

“I was told relations between the US and UNITA were very good. This was proven, because I myself saw medicines sent from the US. I used to distribute some weapons from the US to my fellow soldiers.”

The United States stopped supporting UNITA in 1993 when the guerrillas violated an internationally brokered peace plan. But UNITA continued fighting, forcing thousands of children to become soldiers. Many, like Feliciano Salamungo, were forced by circumstances to become men. But the child in Feliciano lay just beneath the surface.

“I missed my family,” he recalled. “Several times I cried.”

He especially missed them when he heard that his mother had died. He had not spoken with her since he was taken 25 years before. “I was very sad because I didn’t know my father. When I heard about my mother’s death, I was very sad. I cried a lot.”
Feliciano belonged to a force supporting the front linesproviding food, clothes, and ammunition. He says he saw many young people like himself forced to kill, but he says he never had to. That was one of the few good things about his time as a guerrilla. Because there was a chance the Angolan government soldier on the other side may have been his own brother.

‘It Was Hard, But What Could I Do?’

Jerimias Salamungo had joined the Angolan army before Feliciano was abducted. The government didn’t abduct children to become soldiers, but teens under 18 fought in the government militarysometimes as volunteers, sometimes as conscripts. Jerimias had no idea that his brother had become his enemy. But one day he got the word.

“It was hard, but what could I do?” he said. “I was also forced to do that. At that time when you don’t identify with the side where you are, you can be identified as somebody collaborating with the other side. This could be very dangerous.”
The Salamungo family was touched by the war in many other ways. Their sister was forced to marry an MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) officer. Like many women, including those forced to marry UNITA guerrillas, once the war ended, she left her husband. It was different for Feliciano, who married in the busha young woman, herself abducted at the age of eight.

A 12-year-old girl created this drawing of a mother killed in the Chechnya conflict.
Learn more about these drawings
child’s drawing of a burning house and a dying woman
“When I heard about my mother’s death, I was very sad. I cried a lot.”

The Brothers Meet

Augusta Chilombo was forced to tend the wounded on the battlefield. Fortunately for the Salamungos, the brothers didn’t meet on the battlefield. Instead, they met in a camp as the armed forces were demobilizing after a peace treaty was finally signed in 2002.

By this time, 39-year-old Jerimias had long since been discharged from the Army and was working for an international food aid agency, one that provided food for the former guerrillas in the quartering camps where they were waiting to reenter civilian life. By chance, Feliciano heard his brother’s name called by a colleague. He then asked that he take a letter to the man he thought could be his brother. Jerimias read the letter in disbelief.

“I had to control myself,” Jerimias said. “So okay, if it’s my brother, he’s welcome.”

Within a week, Jerimias was in the camp.

“Before 10 minutes, they were coming with somebody who I couldn’t recognize. I was still keeping an image of my brother when we separated. He was short and a little bit slim. As he was coming closer to us, I recognized his chin. It was the same I used to see when we lived together 22 years ago.”

Feliciano was speechless.
“All the words disappeared from my mouth,” he said. “Twenty-two years of separation isn’t an easy thing.”

Ticking Time Bombs

Nor is it easy for the former UNITA guerrillas who did in fact killif not their brothers, their own kindand were killed in return. Reconciliation is a key challenge in this deeply wounded country.

The other challenge lies in preparing the former soldiers for the lives they left behind when they were children.

“Now the real change is that we are not dealing with them as ex-soldiers but as a child, principally,” said Mario Ferrari, who heads the United Nations Children’s Fund in Angola. “If we can reunite them with families and get them to school and get vocational training, those children can go back to a normal life.”

The Angolan government is keenly aware of the challenge it faces, said Joao Kussumua, Angola’s minister of Social Assistance and Re-insertion.

“Children from 10 to 20 years old were used as soldiers,” he said. “They didn’t study. We have people who passed school age that we must teach to read and write. As you know, the government must solve all the problemseconomic and psychological.”

And that’s the ticking time bomb that makes the peace of Angola so precariousfinding the resources and the places for the thousands of children and adults whose only skills were those learned on the battlefield.

The government must also figure out how to help those like Feliciano’s 29-year-old wife, Augusta Chilombo, who gave birth to their four daughtersvirtually on the battlefield. As shy as she is tiny, she rarely speaks above a whisper until asked about her dreams for her young daughters.

“I would like to see my daughters have a different life from the one I’ve had so far,” she said, her voice filled with commitment and determination. “We were suffering because of war. Now that the war has ended, I would like to see my children having a better life. I would like to see them studying. Then having jobs so they can live well.”
Whatever else Angola’s long night of war may have destroyed, it failed to destroy the capacity to dream. It’s now up to the people of Angola and countries around the world to help the dreams for their wounded children become reality.

(_http://www . warchildren . org /two_brothers.html#more)

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