UN demands protection for children in conflict areas

he United Nations Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Leila Zerrougui has called for children in the northeast to be protected from relentless violence.

Zerrougui, who met federal authorities, UN and diplomatic officials alongside state officials in Adamawa state, during a weeklong visit to assess reports of grave violations against children, urged for better protection for children and accountability.

“I witnessed people’s shock and disbelief at the devastation suffered by their communities,” Zerrougui said in Yola, where she met with families displaced by conflict.

“I saw trauma in children’s eyes. The scale of the suffering is way beyond what I anticipated to find. The people I met demand and deserve urgent protection,” she said.

The UN estimates more than 900, 000 people, many of them women and children, have fled their homes in the north of the country.

In addition, over 300 schools have been severely damaged or destroyed, hundreds of children killed, injured or abducted from their homes and schools.

It has also raised concern about “dramatic rise in violence, growing recruitment and use of children, sometimes very young, as well as countless abductions and attacks on schools.”

Zerrougui commended the attorneygeneral of the federation for “willingness to respond to reports of recruitment and use of children by government-affiliated self-defense groups in the three Northeastern states.”

After talks with officials, she said the justice minister agreed to “issue an advisory recalling the prohibition of such a practice.”

Amidst concern about 2014 being deadly, the representative said the start of 2015 brought again “relentless violence with the appalling suicide bombing committed by a girl allegedly as young as ten, killing several people in a market in Maiduguri, as well as what some organizations have termed as Boko Haram’s deadliest attack in Baga.”