UN & Child Soldiers: A Political Link Between Yemen and Sudan
By Maya Garner
On July 10th, the UN Special Envoy on Yemen Martin Griffiths gave a briefing to the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, emphasizing the need to keep Yemen out of a potential regional conflict. The briefing came after Pompeo recently blocked the decision of experts from the U.S. Department of State to place Saudi Arabia on the official list of countries recruiting child soldiers. This move raises concern that the U.S. under the Trump administration attempts to maintain good economic relations with Saudi Arabia at the expense of children’s rights and its own standards of the conduct of warfare, since the U.S. is the top exporter of arms to Saudi Arabia in the world. Since foreign militias on the list cannot receive U.S. aid, training or weapons, unless the president issues full or partial waivers of the sanctions, Pompeo’s move is a thinly-disguised attempt to continue its arms sales without consequences.
Pompeo’s decision came out of an intense internal debate, and it is part of the divisions in the U.S. government with regard to the issue of Yemen. The experts who recommended Saudi Arabia to be put on the list come from the anti-human trafficking office, tasked with the important role of investigating the use of child soldiers in the world. The child soldier list will be part of the state department’s annual global Trafficking Persons report. The Saudi government maintains that the accusations are false, though it will not be placed on the list this year due to Pompeo’s decision. Meanwhile, Sudan will be reinstated on the list, while it was previously removed last year. A spokesman for the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, previously known as the Janjaweed, denies the use of child soldiers.
The issue came to public attention half a year ago with the reporting of the New York Times on the recruitment of underage Sudanese mercenaries by Saudi Arabia for deployment to Yemen. The report emphasized that since the end of 2016, the Saudi-led coalition has at any given time deployed as many as 14,000 Sudanese, including children as young as 14, to fight in Yemen, offering payments of up to $10,000 per recruit. Close to all recruits came from the war-torn and impoverished region of Darfur, which saw the displacement of 1.2 million people and the killing of 300,000 in a bit over a decade. Desperate families have sent off their sons to fight in Yemen in exchange of money. The New York Times’ sources each stated that minors had composed 20-40% of their personal units. Forces in Yemen are controlled remotely through radio and GPS by Saudi and Emirati soldiers, and critics emphasize that the Sudanese are simply used as mercenaries with little personal interest in the Yemen conflict. Indeed, as opposed to troops sent by other countries, the payment from Saudi Arabia goes to the Sudanese fighters directly, which only has indirect influences on the Sudanese economy.
Most of the Sudanese fighters belong to paramilitia the Rapid Support Forces, which have been accused of the systematic use of rape of woman and girls as a weapon of war, recently on June 3rd against protesters in Khartoum, as well as indiscriminate killing and other war crimes in Darfur. Instead of going through processes of accountability, veterans of past fighting in Darfur are now deployed in Yemen. This composition of underage fighters and former perpetrators of war crimes sheds light on the reality of the Sudanese troops in the Yemen war, in which the usage of mercenaries and the “export” of soldiers like a “commodity,” violate principles of human rights and conduct of warfare, and underlines the importance of investigations undertaken by investigative committees against human trafficking.
The UN must publicly recognize that the use of Sudanese fighters in Yemen is contrary to universal values global interests of peace-keeping and de-escalation processes, and against the interests of the citizens of Sudan and Yemen, who have become victim to proxy-warfare and the interests of powerful states. The UN must establish an independent investigation into the usage of child soldiers by the Rapid Support Forces and the perpetration of war crimes in Yemen and Sudan. The UN must pressure the U.S., as well as the other top arms exporters to Saudi Arabia, to put human rights, and children’s rights, at the core of its foreign policies and not let economic interests take priority over human rights. The U.S.’s failure to adhere to its own experts’ advice places the residual responsibility on the United Nations, the UN Human Rights Council and associated Special Reporters, and the General Assembly to prevent the export of weapons to countries making use of child mercenaries; not to mention to reign in its member states that support the Saudi-coalition in its contribution to the world’s worst humanitarian disaster in Yemen.
