Tag Archives: children use in war

Mining and Child Prostitution

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Years ago, education officials in the remote mining town, Mahdia Guyana, installed metal bars on the windows of the high school’s dormitory partly to keep girls and boys from being preyed upon in a town known for parties, nightclubs and brothels frequented by local gold miners.

But the grates and padlocked doors meant to protect students instead helped seal their fate as fire tore through the girls facility one night in late May 2023, killing 20, mostly indigenous girls from far-flung hamlets served by the school. Their bodies were so badly incinerated that authorities in this impoverished South American nation had to send DNA samples to New York to identify the victims. The tragedy rocked the small, South American country where poverty and child sexual exploitation remain entrenched in its lawless mining regions…

For decades, the gold deposits around Mahdia have drawn members of indigenous communities, young men from Guyana’s Atlantic coast, as well as Brazilian and Venezuelan wildcat miners who pay indigenous councils a 10% cut of their haul, according to Cornel Edwards, a 70-year-old toshao, or local chieftain. Some of those men have long flocked to Mahdia for booze and sex after toiling in mud pits hunting for gold, local government and residents say…

Children being lured into dangerous mining work and child prostitution in lawless mining regions are common in other countries in South America, including Ecuador and Colombia, according to a U.S. Labor Department report from 2021. In 2017, Unicef published a tool kit for industrial mining firms, offering guidelines on how to train workers at large-scale as well as smaller companies that buy gold from individual miners on the risks of children forced into sex work in mining areas.

Excerpts from Kejal Vya, Deadly School Fire Casts Light on Sexual Exploitation in Guyana Mining Town, WSJ, July 23, 2023

The De-humanization of a Nation

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Rebels and government troops in Congo committed atrocities including mass rape, cannibalism and dismembering civilians, according to testimony published by a team of UN human rights experts who said the world must pay heed.

The team investigating conflict in the Kasai region of Democratic Republic of Congo told the UN Human Rights Council they suspected all sides were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.   Their detailed 126-page report catalogued gruesome attacks committed in the conflict, which erupted in late 2016, involving Kamuina Nsapu and Bana Mura militias and Congo’s armed forces, the FARDC.

The testimony included boys forced to rape their mothers, little girls told witchcraft would allow them to catch bullets, and women forced to choose gang-rape or death.  “One victim told us in May 2017 she saw a group of Kamuina Nsapu militia, some sporting female genitals (clitorises and vaginas) as medals,” the report said.   “Some witnesses recalled seeing people cutting up, cooking and eating human flesh, including penises cut from men who were still alive and from corpses, especially FARDC and drinking human blood.”

Lead investigator Bacre Waly Ndiaye told the Council in one incident, at least 186 men and boys from a single village were beheaded by Kamuina Nsapu, many of whose members were children forced to fight, unarmed or wielding sticks and were convinced magic made them invulnerable.   Many child soldiers were killed when FARDC soldiers machine-gunned them indiscriminately, he said. “The bodies were often buried in mass graves or were sometimes piled in trucks by soldiers to be buried elsewhere.”   There were initially thought to be about 86 mass graves, but after investigating the team suspects there may be hundreds, he said.

Excerpts from DR Congo war atrocities, Reuters, July 4, 2018

Rape in Congo

How to Use Children for War

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From 13 to 23 June 2017, the High Commissioner for Human Rights deployed a team of human rights officers to Angola to interview refugees who had fled violent attacks launched between 12 March and 19 June 2017, on different villages of Kamonia territory, Kasai province, in the context of the ongoing crisis in the Greater Kasai region, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 

Human rights violations and abuses were committed against civilians by DRC Government armed forces and pro-Government militia – the Bana Mura – and by an anti-Government militia – the Kamuina Nsapu – during attacks on villages, that were often launched along ethnic lines. The violence has caused thousands of victims since August 2016 and MONUSCO identified at least 80 mass graves as of July 2017. According to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR), approximately 30,000 people fled the Kasai to Angola between April and 22 June 2017 while 1.3 million people were internally displaced.

In all incidents documented by the team, the Kamuina Nsapu were reported to have used boys and girls, many aged between seven and 13, as fighters. Witnesses also said groups of girls called “Lamama” accompanied the militia, shaking their straw skirts and drinking victims’ blood as part of a magic ritual that was supposed to render the group invincible. All the refugees interviewed by the team said they were convinced of the magical powers of the Kamuina Nsapu.

“This generalised belief, and resulting fear, by segments of the population in the Kasais may partly explain why a poorly armed militia, composed to a large extent of children, has been able to resist offensives by a national army for over a year,”

Excerpts from Report of a Mission of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights – accounts of Congolese fleeing the crisis in the Kasai region, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Aug. 2017