Protecting the Vulnerable During Armed Conflicts

Protecting the Vulnerable During Armed Conflicts

By Abdulsalam Mahmud

49 years ago, the United Nations, UN, adopted the ‘Declaration on the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict’. The Declaration came into force in 1974, the same year it was adopted by the UN.

It was proposed by the United Nations Economic and Social Council, UNESCO, on the grounds that women and children are often the victims of wars, civil unrests, and other emergency situations that cause them to suffer “inhuman acts and consequently suffer serious harm”.

The Declaration further prohibits attacks against or imprisonment of civilian women and children, while also upholding the sanctity of the rights of women and children during armed conflicts.

According to Wikipedia, the Declaration states that women and children suffer victimization during armed conflict due to “suppression, aggression, colonialism, racism, alien domination and foreign subjugation”. The major excerpts of the UN-backed Declaration include;

1. Attacks and bombings on the civilian population, inflicting incalculable suffering, especially on women and children, who are the most vulnerable members of the population, shall be prohibited, and such acts shall be condemned.

2. The use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in the course of military operations constitutes one of the most flagrant violations of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the principles of international humanitarian law and inflicts heavy losses on civilian populations, including defenceless women and children, and shall be severely condemned.

3. All States shall abide fully by their obligations under the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and the Geneva Conventions of 1949, as well as other instruments of international law relative to respect for human rights in armed conflicts, which offer important guarantees for the protection of women and children.

4. All efforts shall be made by States involved in armed conflicts, military operations in foreign territories or military operations in territories still under colonial domination to spare women and children from the ravages of war. All the necessary steps shall be taken to ensure the prohibition of measures such as persecution, torture, punitive measures, degrading treatment and violence, particularly against that part of the civilian population that consists of women and children.

5. All forms of repression and cruel and inhuman treatment of women and children, including imprisonment, torture, shooting, mass arrests, collective punishment, destruction of dwellings and forcible eviction, committed by belligerents in the course of military operations or in occupied territories shall be considered criminal.

6. Women and children belonging to the civilian population and finding themselves in circumstances of emergency and armed conflict in the struggle for peace, self-determination, national liberation and independence, or who live in occupied territories, shall not be deprived of shelter, food, medical aid or other inalienable rights, in accordance with the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of the Child or other instruments of international law.

It however seems as if the Declaration is merely what it is. It is not one that has significantly guaranteed the safety of women and children, during armed conflicts and emergencies. Civil wars and political conflicts across many African nations and in other continents after 1974 have claimed the lives of women and innocent children, in millions.

During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped. The west African nation of Liberia, between 1989 and 2003, had its civil war, which brutally ravaged the nation, leading to the death of close to 250,000 people.

Women were raped and mutilated; while warlords recruited child soldiers to fuel the conflict; even as tens of thousands of people were displaced and fled the country. At the height of the Nigerian civil war, an estimated 10,000 people (including 6,000 children) died from starvation every day.

Also during the war, many Nigerian women and children were exposed to all sorts of exploitation and abuses. The number of attacks by Boko Haram in the Northeast Nigeria and neighbouring countries has risen, and half a million children have had to flee to safety…, bringing the total number of displaced children in the region to 1.4 million, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) disclosed, not too long ago.

In the ongoing war between Israel and Palestine, the government media office in the Gaza Strip last Saturday announced that the death toll from Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip has risen to 9,500, with well over half of them women and children. “The death toll as a result of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip since October 7 is 9,500, including 3,900 children and 2,509 women,” Salama Marouf, the head of the media office, told a press conference.

But unlike the Israeli military forces, men of the Nigerian Armed Forces in asymmetrical warfare with Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West African Province, ISWAP, extremists for almost 14 years now, have been cautious of civilian population in the North East.

Though instances of collateral damage and miscalculated air raids killing innocent citizens have been recorded in recent years, they were not deliberately intended, from the onset. The Nigerian military, to a large extent, has done a lot to protect not only the women and vulnerable children hit by terrorism, but the entire people of the North East region.

Its troops have severally rescued women, children and other residents of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States, abducted by terrorists. Our military forces in the last three years successfully rescued some of the Chibok girls kidnapped at their Chibok Secondary School in 2014.

Is there any strategy that the Nigerian military adopted to ensure the protection of vulnerable persons at war-torn places in the country? The Defence Headquarters, DHQ, said the asymmetric nature of current security challenges in the country has made the military and other security agencies adopt a more realistic gender mainstreaming strategy to defend and protect women and children during conflicts.

It also said that the Armed Forces of Nigeria has attained 27.9 percent female participation in peace support operations, as against the 17 percent benchmark recommended by the UN. The Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Christopher Musa, said this at a one-day ‘Gender Mainstreaming Conference’ organized in Abuja, last week.

He said the Nigerian military had received encomium from the UN and the Africa Union (AU) for adopting commendable gender mainstreaming policies in all its military operations within and outside Nigeria. The CDS said: “The available record reveals that the Armed Forces of Nigeria have been able to attain 27.9 per cent female participation in peacekeeping operations”.

While our military personnel may not be honoured for upholding the sanctity of the female gender and children during conflict situations, they should not be perturbed. They should continue to thread the righteous path they have already taken. In fact, they should do more to ensure that our women and their children, particularly those in the North East, are adequately protected from the havoc of terrorists, who still launch attacks occasionally.

Heavy military presence is still needed at many towns and villages in Borno and Yobe villages, especially. On the international scene, the atrocities of the Israeli government and military, together with that of Russia, among other superpowers oppressing Palestine, Ukraine and other less powerful nations, must be halted.

Necessary mechanisms must be activated by the UN to sanction the Israeli and Russian authorities, who see themselves as tin gods. Enforcing political and economic sanctions on the two European states will not be too harsh. They must be reined in, and not necessarily because their troops have senselessly massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent women and children.

Rather for the barbaric war crime they have perpetrated against humanity, as a whole.

Mahmud is the Deputy Editor of PRNigeria, and wrote in via: [email protected].