May 23 2008
Myanmar cyclone hits the most vulnerable hardest
Burmese child soldier in WWII
(photo by Henry Allen, from the National Archives, 1944)
Myanmar, Seth Mydans wrote in The New York Times this week, has one of the world’s highest recruitments of child soldiers, with many of them coerced through violence, kidnapping, and terror to join the army.
Mydans draws his information from a report recently released by Human Rights Watch on the use of child soldiers worldwide. According to the report, Myanmar is the worst offender, beating out Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo.
Mydans sums up Myanmar’s evaluation in the article:
The report, issued last October, said that military recruiters and civilian brokers scour train stations, bus stations, markets and other public places for boys and coerce them to volunteer.
The recent cyclone has only exacerbated the problem. With homes and families wiped away, some small children get lost and don’t even know the names of the villages they come from.
Relief groups are trying to do something about the swarms of children that wander around crowded and chaotic refugee camps, but they don’t have a program to try to help families reconnect in place yet.
This is a concern, because the chaos has put the cyclone’s most vulnerable survivors at extremely high risk of being trafficked into the military or sexual abuse.
