CNSNews.com - U.N. Pressed to Investigate Taliban’s Use of Children As Suicide Bombers

CNSNews.com - U.N. Pressed to Investigate Taliban’s Use of Children As Suicide Bombers

(CNSNews.com) – Reports that Taliban terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan are buying and selling children to use as suicide bombers have prompted an international human rights organization to renew its longstanding calls for the United Nations to declare suicide terrorism a crime against humanity.



The Washington Times reported on July 2 that Baitullah Mehsud, head of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, has been buying children as young as seven to use as suicide bombers in attacks against Pakistani targets as well as Afghan and U.S. military targets in Afghanistan.

It cited Pakistani and U.S. official as saying the terrorist leader was paying $7,000- $14,000 for each child, with the price paid depending on how quickly the child was needed and how close to the intended target the child was expected to get.

This week the Pakistani military confirmed the reports, telling CNN that Mehsud has admitted running a center to train young boys for suicide missions. The military released a video purporting to show boys as young as 11 being trained.

Both the U.S. and Pakistani governments are offering rewards for information leading to the capture or killing of Mehsud, who is believed to be in hiding in the tribal belt adjacent to Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The U.S. describes him as a “key al-Qaeda facilitator” who has conducted cross-border attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and poses a clear threat to Americans and U.S. interests in the region.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban has close ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Last December, three British Royal Marines were killed in a bomb blast while patrolling in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. According to reports, the bomb was packed in a barrow pushed towards the Marines by a 13-year-old boy, who also died in the explosion.

On Sunday, U.S. officials reported that a terrorist suspected of recruiting child suicide bombers had been captured in Afghanistan.

Citing the new reports, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) wrote to top U.N. officials this week on the subject. The Jewish human rights group has since 2004 been campaigning for the international community to declare suicide terrorism a crime against humanity.

The tactic has been used with growing frequency since the early 1980s, when Hezbollah suicide truck bombers attacked U.S. and French targets in Lebanon, killing 362 people, including 220 U.S. Marines. Hundreds of Israelis have been killed in scores of Palestinian suicide bombings since 1993.

The method has been used in numerous countries in the Middle East and South Asia, and with deadly effect against Westerners in the U.S., Britain, Spain and Indonesia since 2001, and against coalition and local forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pakistan has been particularly heavily hit by suicide bombings since 2007. This year alone, according to records kept by the South Asian Terrorism Portal in New Delhi, hundreds of Pakistani civilians and security force members have lost their lives in at least 38 separate suicide bombings.

Although the tactic was favored by Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, a predominantly Hindu group, most of its use in modern times has been by Islamic extremists. Many Muslim religious and political leaders around the world have condemned it, but others have justified its use, sometimes citing the Koran and other Islamic writings in doing so.

A Pew Global Attitudes survey in 2007 highlighted the finding that support for suicide bombings in the Muslim world had declined since earlier in the decade – but even so, 42 percent of Muslim respondents in Nigeria, 34 percent in Lebanon, 26 percent in Malaysia and 23 percent in Jordan still said that suicide bombings against civilians “in defense of Islam” could often or sometimes be justified. The figure was highest among Palestinian respondents, 70 percent of whom backed that view.

‘Those who recruit, arm and glorify bombers are all responsible’

In its letter to the U.N., the SWC director for international relations, Dr. Shimon Samuels, urged the world body’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navanethem Pillay, to “promptly condemn suicide bombings as a specific crime.”

He also repeated an earlier proposal that the high commissioner’s office appoint a “special rapporteur” on the issue.

The U.N. has several dozen such reporter-investigators, each focused on a particular country situation or on a theme such as racism, the right to food, or extreme poverty. Of 26 current thematic mandates, the only one related to terrorism deals with human rights violations that may occur in the context of counter-terrorism activities.

The SWC says it first approached Pillay’s predecessor, Louise Arbour, about designating a special rapporteur on suicide terrorism in 2006, but the proposal went nowhere despite expressions of interest from more than 20 member states’ governments.

The center formulated a draft convention arguing that all of the links in the chain of suicide terrorism, “those who recruit, house, finance, arm, transport or glorify
terrorists,” should be considered complicit.

Samuels also addressed this week’s appeal to Ann Veneman, executive director of the U.N. Children’s Fund. He asked UNICEF to “launch an enquiry into the purchase of children for suicide-bombings by the Taliban, and to also include the incitement to martyrdom of children by other terrorist movements, inter alia, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad.”

For years the U.N. has failed in attempts to draw up a definition of terrorism, largely because governments supporting the Palestinian cause view them as an attempt to undermine the Palestinians’ “right to resist occupation.”

Even though that definition remains elusive, the SWC argues that the question of suicide bombings provides a specific area for transnational cooperation, given that “a growing number of nations in all regions are victims of suicide bombings.”

Queries sent to Pillay’s office this week brought no response. A spokesman for UNICEF chief Veneman said he was unaware of the letter but would look into the matter.