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08/10/2005:

"Iraq’s Children: Choir of Despair"

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a wide range of specific rights and protection measures to protect children worldwide. It is also the most ratified international human rights treaty ever. It strictly prohibits the abuse and torture of children. In most Western countries, including the US, the abuse of children is a criminal offensive. However, this is not the case when the crimes are committed against Iraqi children by Western forces. It is part of the destructive policy brought into Iraq by the US Occupation of the country.


Contrary to Western politicians, Western media and Western "progressives" who welcomed the illegal war of aggression against Iraq, the plight of Iraqi children under Occupation is worsening. On all levels – human rights abuse, healthcare, medical, educational, and psychological – the Iraqi children are enduring immense hardship and suffering. It is a cover-up of crimes against humanity.

A recent investigation by Neil Mackay of the Sunday Herald, (01/08/05) has revealed that US-British forces are holding more than 100 children in jails such as Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in the south. Witnesses claim that the detainees – some as young as 10 – are also being subjected to rape and torture. The investigation is based on classified UNICEF report written in June titled Children in Conflict with the Law or With Coalition Forces and on reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Many Iraqi children were detained indefinitely detaining some children without access to their family or to lawyers.

The UNICEF report has not been released, because UNICEF is no longer in the humanitarian business of criticising US power and its criminal practices of torture. UNICEF current Executive Director Ann M. Veneman, a member of the Bush cabal and former US secretary of Agriculture, is not likely to offend the Bush administration by releasing the report.

The Sunday Herald noted that a section of the report reads: ‘Information on the number, age, gender and conditions of incarceration is limited. In Basra and Karbala children arrested for alleged activities targeting the occupying forces are reported to be routinely transferred to an internee facility in Um Qasr. The categorisation of these children as ‘internees’ is worrying since it implies indefinite holding without contact with family, expectation of trial or due process’. Um Qasr is a port city on Iraq’s southern border and isolated from the other centres. Further, Reports from Iraq accuse the US Marines of kidnapping children and hold them as hostages.
Full:globalresearch.ca