PESHAWAR, 26 May 2008 (IRIN) - Authorities are investigating allegations that militants running some madrassas (Islamic schools) in Swat Valley, north-western Pakistan, are recruiting and training children as soldiers.

According to local newspaper reports, the police are questioning six men accused of such offences.

The Swat Valley area, some 160km northeast from Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) capital Peshawar, has seen intense fighting between militants and government forces since November 2007.

However, an agreement was finalised on 21 May between representatives of the militants and government officials in NWFP, under which it is hoped peace will return to the area.

Shaukat Salim, the district coordinator of the Child Rights Committee (CRC) of the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC), an Islamabad-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), told IRIN that child militancy had been on the rise in the area.

Child militants caught

Salim said that about 25 to 30 madrassa students, aged between seven and 15, had been used by leaders of extremist outfits in Swat to carry out attacks. These children have been detained by security forces and are being held at Swat District Jail.

According to Salim, six others students from a madrassa in the Kabal tehsil (sub-district) have been apprehended by the police for their alleged involvement in an attempted suicide attack.

Salim also cited the story of Abid, 12, who he said had been forced to wear a suicide bomb jacket with which he was to blow up the district courts. He was also caught and is among those being held at Swat jail, Salim said.

Mian Iftikhar Hussain, NWFP information minister, has stated that the provincial government was "committed to end the suffering caused by militancy in the province".

Child militants beyond NWFP
This is not the first time in Pakistan that accounts of the recruitment of children as suicide bombers or of training as militants have surfaced.

Some journalists were recently taken to the town of Spinkai in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which lies along the troubled border with Afghanistan, immediately after it had been cleared of militants by the Pakistan military. The journalists reported seeing video footage of teenage boys carrying out executions of those deemed 'enemies' by militants. Other pictures showed a classroom of boys being trained to fight.

A few months ago, teenager Muhammad Jamshed from Lahore told IRIN how at the age of 15 he had been sent by his parents to a madrassa in the town of Kasur along the India-Pakistan border.

"The treatment was very harsh. We were beaten and also some well known militant figures came to the madrassa to persuade students to come with them for 'jihad' [holy war]," Jamshed said, adding that some pupils had gone along with the clerics, but he was not aware of their fate.

ABBOTABAD, 25 May 2008 (IRIN) - At first glance, it is hard to believe Muhsin, 10, once went to school regularly and had dreams of being a pilot. Rummaging through the trash in the town of Abbotabad in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, he now scavenges the ground for cardboard, empty bottles and metal scrap that he sells to make less than US$1 a day.

“I had to drop out of school,” he told IRIN, wiping his soiled face on his sleeve as he took a break. “But what else could I do? After the earthquake I had to help my family.”

Muhsin’s father died after their rented house in the nearby town of Balokot, the quake’s epicentre, collapsed around them, leaving him and his two brothers no choice but to move to Abbotabad with their mother to find work.

“I want to return to school, but I can’t,” said Muhsin. “It’s simply not possible.”

There are thousands of children like Muhsin across quake-affected northern Pakistan who have been forced out of the classroom and into the labour market to support their families in the aftermath of the October 2005 earthquake.
Over 73,000 lives were lost and more than 3.5 million rendered homeless in what has been described as the worst disaster ever to strike the South Asian nation.

Many of the children come from the poorest of the poor, leaving them no other option but to migrate to the larger cities and towns in the area to seek employment - many without their families.

“All of a sudden there were more and more children and their families coming to larger cities to find work,” Violet Speek-Warnery, a child protection specialist with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said.

3.3 million children at work

More than two and half years on, Pakistani authorities have expressed concern over a rise in child labour - already a serious problem throughout Pakistan - in the quake-affected area.

A Child Labour Survey conducted by the Federal Bureau of Statistics in 1996, the most recent available official statistics on the issue, shows that 3.3 million children under the age of 14 were working. Aid workers say that figure is likely to much higher now.
In towns such as Abbotabad, children can be seen sleeping in the open air, something unheard of before 2005. This has prompted the government to set up a school specifically for children working in the area.

“Before the earthquake, the ratio of children involved in child labour was around five percent. Today it’s more than 15 percent,” Faiz Ullah, assistant director of the Abbotabad labour department, said, estimating that some 10,000 children in the quake-affected area were working to support their families

According to non-governmental organisation (NGO) Save the Children Sweden, the figure is much higher despite there being a lack of verifiable and quantifiable data.

“To me the number would be significantly more. Ten thousand is a very low number,” Ghulum Qadri, programme manager for the NGO in Pakistan, said.

According to data the NGO collected at the end of last year and is still analysing from some 5,000 children in the quake-affected districts of Battagram, Abbotabad and Mansehra, prior to the quake approximately 20 percent of children worked. Today, some 35 percent of children in these areas work.

UNICEF steps in

Working closely with local authorities and the Jobs Creating Development Society (JCDS), a local NGO in Abbotabad, UNICEF has established two child protection centres in the city where some 500 children were found to be working.
In these centres, children are offered non-formal education as a way of reintegrating them into government schools, explained UNICEF child protection officer Agnes Mutenyo Karani.

Additionally, workers at the centre have the opportunity to meet with local employers in an effort to raise awareness of children’s rights so that child labour can be avoided.

Most of the participants are boys, but a large number of girls are also present, many working as domestic servants in the quake-affected area, according to Speek-Warnery.

To attend, children must get permission from their parents and employers. Then, classes are fast-tracked or back-tracked according to the child’s individual needs, Speek-Warnery said.

“Some children have attended school formally before, while others haven’t at all. We need to integrate our curriculum accordingly,” Akbar Ali, a child protection monitor for JCDS, added.

Results promising

Of the 119 children who have attended to date, 43 have been successfully re-united with their families through family counselling and with livelihood support they are now back to school. For the remaining 76, individual plans for reintegration are being followed up.

“I’m happy to be back,” smiled eight-year-old Hameed-ullah who had dropped out of school in Muzaffarabad after the quake and until recently had been scavenging on the streets of Abbotabad with his older brother.

NEW DELHI: The government will next week release a Protocol on Prevention, Rescue, Repatriation and Rehabilitation of migrant and trafficked child labour.

The protocol will lay down guidelines on actions to be taken by different departments of the State governments, police, NGOs and other stakeholders in rescuing and rehabilitating child workers.

Since a large number of rescued child labour are migrants who need to be sent back to their states, the protocol has provisions for repatriation of such children also, Union Labour and Employment Secretary Sudha Pillai told reporters here on Thursday. The protocol has been drafted on the directions of the Delhi High Court and will be sent to all the States who are bound to implement it. The Centre will monitor its implementation.

Ms. Pillai said the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) would be able to put in place multi-fund managers by September to maximise return on investment. Expression of Interest has been issued in this connection and Crisil has been engaged as a consultant for finalising the fund managers. The EPFO, however, is not ready to invest 5 per cent of the corpus in the stock markets because of a highly volatile market that would be risky.

Ms. Pillai said more than 50,000 smart cards have been issued in the Capital, Haryana and Rajasthan under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, a health insurance scheme for those living below the poverty line that became operational from April 1, 2008. Twenty-eight individuals have already availed themselves of the benefits of the scheme, which will be rolled out to 60 million people in the next five years.

This will be the biggest-ever exercise involving Income Tax applications for the poorest of the poor families in the country or anywhere else in the world.

NEW DELHI: The labour ministry, which had come in for criticism for not being serious in implementing the Child Labour Act, has issued a 'protocol on rescue of child labour' on the directions of the Delhi High Court.

Labour secretary Sudha Pillai said, "A protocol on prevention, rescue, repatriation and rehabilitation of migrant and trafficked child labour has been issued." Since the protocol was issued on the directive of the HC, she hoped that states would be compelled to cooperate with labour ministry in implementing it.

Since a large number of rescued child labourers are found to be migrants who need to be restored, a draft protocol was prepared by the ministry some time back. The protocol lay down guidelines on actions to be taken by different departments of state governments, police, children and women commissions, non-government organisations and other stakeholders.

Of the 1.2 crore child labourers in the country, the government had succeeded in rescuing and mainstreaming only 392,413 all over the country. As a result, the government was criticised for not being serious about implementing the Child Labour Act.

A National Child Labour Policy was initiated in 1987 with a view to eliminate child labour with a three-pronged endeavour — project based action plan in child labour endemic areas, targeting development of families of child workers and strict enforcement of Child Labour Act.

Recently, the government had prohibited employment of children as domestic servants and in hospitality and recreation sectors.

Officials said the labour ministry was making efforts for convergence with other ministries — women and child development, HRD and rural development. It also launched a nationwide enforcement drive against child labour in November 2007. State governments were requested to step up enforcement drives and money was given to states for awareness generation.

Pillai said the National Child Labour Programme had been expanded from 250 districts in the 10th plan to 600 districts. Budget allocation had also been increased from Rs 602 crore to Rs 3,800 crore. Nevertheless, she admitted that the Centre had to depend largely on the cooperation of state governments for stricter implementation of the Child Labour Act.

United Nations, May 23: The International Labour Organisation, a UN agency, has partnered with the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, for a five-year project to help Pakistan curb abusive child labour practices and take 10,000 children out of hazardous workplaces.

The 5.2 million euro scheme will focus on children working in conditions ranging from exposure to chemicals and other harmful substances to long, tedious working hours.

The ''Combating Abusive Child Labour II'' programme will be implemented by the ILO, in cooperation with such bodies as the Ministry of Labour and Manpower, provincial labour departments, employers and workers organisations, local governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), research institutions and the news media.

The director of the Pakistan office of ILO, Donglin Li, underscored yesterday his agency's commitment to curbing the worst forms of child labour by 2016 within the framework of the ILO Decent Work Agenda.

Swedish telecom giant Ericsson has promised swift action after revelations of dangerous working conditions and child labour at factories operated by its suppliers in Bangladesh.

• Ericsson report boosts stock exchange (26 Apr 08)
• Ericsson beats expectations (25 Apr 08)
• Sony Ericsson sees profits halved (23 Apr 08)

“The poor conditions in Bangladesh are unacceptable and we deeply regret that we haven’t had better internal inspections,” Ericsson’s head of communications, Henry Sténson, said in a statement.

A report to be aired on Wednesday night by the Sveriges Television's investigative news programme Uppdrag Granskning examines factories in Bangladesh which supply components to Ericsson and its Norwegian counterpart Telenor.

Journalists who visited suppliers found employees working without protective equipment near zinc baths kept at 460 degrees Celsius, workers between 14 and 17-years-old, as well as untreated wastewater, according to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, which had access to an advance screening of the report.

Images reveal that workers tending to acid baths only put on helmets and masks when the television crew brings out its cameras. After the cameras are put away, so is the protective gear.

The family of a 22-year-old worker who died after falling into a galvanizing tub was paid the equivalent of 22,000 kronor ($3,600) and made to sign a paper promising to release the supplier from any responsibility for the man's death.

Ericsson has seen the report and confirmed the factories’ poor working conditions and sloppy environmental controls.

The company says it has broken off relations with three of the four suppliers featured in the Uppdrag Granskning report, but has chosen to work together with the fourth—Confidence Steel—to establish a series of measures to rectify the problems.

“It’s good that we’ve been able to see these images because we can now correct the poor conditions and moreover have a better internal focus on these issues,” said Sténson.

“We will not give up on our code of conduct and we will increase awareness internally of the demands we place on our suppliers.”

Ericsson has also promised to initiate a program to improve conditions at other suppliers in Bangladesh, and plans to perform a comprehensive review of all its suppliers in the region

India has the world's largest number of child labourers even today.

The five-hour drive from Coimbatore to Munnar through the picturesque ghats could have been a visual treat but for the brief meeting with Mithailal Tikri at a tea shop, just half an hour into the journey.

Ten-year-old Mithai is mopping the floors at the shop and runs to take the order as the owner barks at him. His torn trousers and dirty shirt are perhaps good enough reasons why the tea shop is empty even though the tourist season is just about peaking. After all, health-conscious tourists would barely like to be served tea by "unhygienic" child labour.
Mithai says his father, who worked as a labourer in a towel factory in Coimbatore, died two years ago. His mother works as a cook in a nearby dhaba, and Mithai doesn't mind the frequent twisting of his ears by the owner of the tea shop because of the free meals and Rs 10-a-day salary. The bonus: he is allowed to go to his mother after 8 pm.
Even as he serves us tea, the little labourer requests us not to mention all this when we meet the owner for settling the bill. Thus, Mithai is a slight variation of his original name.

Mithai is just an example of how the stigma of child labour persists in India even one-and-a-half years after the government banned the hiring of children as domestic helps or for employing in restaurants and eateries. The ban was merely an extension of the Child Labour Act, 1986, under which children are prohibited from working in hazardous industrial units.

India, home to the world's largest number of child labourers (the official estimate is 11 million though the actual figure is estimated at over 100 million), is indeed keeping its dubious record intact — a fact exemplified by the countless Mithais across the country. They are still mopping floors in residences, sweating in the heat of stone quarries, working in the fields 16 hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or serving at roadside eateries. Worse, their presence in hazardous occupations only seems to grow bigger and bigger.

Some actions have been taken by the law-enforcing agencies but they have mostly remained just a farce. Take, for example, the televised raids on embroidery workshops across Delhi sometime back. About 550 boys aged between 5 and 15 were rescued from these shops, but no one could decide what to do with the children. So they were locked up in an empty shopping mall for a week, traumatised and miserable, until they found some temporary shelter. No one has heard about them after the TV cameras moved on to something more interesting.

Take the beedi industry. The average number of beedies a child labourer rolls in a day is 1,500, for an average daily wage of Rs 9. The working conditions are dangerous to the child's health. The long hours spent hunched over the basket of tobacco causes growth deformities, and the constant proximity to tobacco dust causes and exacerbates lung diseases; there is a high rate of tuberculosis in communities dedicated to the manufacture of beedis.

And a Human Rights Watch study has shown how every industry thoroughly violates the protective regulations of the Child Labour Act. The violated provisions include the right to an hour of rest after three hours of work; a maximum work day of six hours; a prohibition of child work before 8 am or after 7 pm; a mandatory day of rest every week; and the requirement that various health and safety precautions be observed.

Thankfully, there are some examples that stand out amidst all this gloom. The initiative, however, hasn't come from the law-enforcing authorities, but from some of the NGOs who have done pioneering work in this regard. Take this example set by SETU, an NGO, and Unicef.

A report brought out by the two organisations quotes children at a slaughter house at Parbhani, a small village near Aurangabad, as saying that they had to force the animals down with their tiny hands and then cut them. Over half of the workers at the abattoir were children between six and 14. They had to cut, skin and break cattle bones. Some had to even blow into the spleens of dead cattle as part of its cleaning ritual. The children belonged to the Qureshi community and the job was passed on from one generation to another. The abattoirs escaped the law by not putting the names of the children on the official rolls.

SETU and Unicef got into the act and helped rehabilitate all the 550 child-workers through a sustained programme of social mobilisation, education, health and women's empowerment.

Examples like this give some rays of hope for the Mithailals of the world.

Leading politicians from the three main parties are putting pressure on the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, to halt the disappearance from care of hundreds of suspected victims of child trafficking.

The Guardian revealed last month that more than 400 foreign children vulnerable to exploitation in prostitution, the drugs trade and domestic servitude went missing from care around major British ports and airports between 2004 and 2007. But the government has rebuffed calls for a system of professional guardians to look after every suspected victim of child trafficking - a crime the United Nations has described as "a modern-day slave trade".

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, which is investigating human trafficking, said he was "shocked by the number of children going missing". He added that a system of guardians to look after every child now looked "very attractive".

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, called on the government to drop its opposition and fund a system in which every suspected victim of child trafficking is provided with a guardian who "specifically looks out for them and ideally speaks their language".

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said Smith should implement the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings. It requires each child to have "a legal guardian, organisation or authority ... which shall act in the best interests of the child".

"It is disgraceful that this 21st-century version of trading in human misery is still taking place without real action to stop it," said Davis. "It is outrageous that so many cases involving the most vulnerable of victims have been lost."

The children's commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, and Ecpat UK, a coalition of charities including the NSPCC and Anti-Slavery International, also want the guardianship system brought in.

Local authorities have admitted they are losing the battle to keep trafficked children from falling back into their traffickers' hands. Child protection campaigners complain that there are no safe houses in England and suspected victims are housed in less-secure foster homes or council residential blocks. Advocates of a guardianship system claim it would ensure secure housing, education and legal support to stop trafficked children falling back into the hands of their exploiters. The proposals are based on the Dutch system, which has €25m (£20m) a year in public funding.

In Britain, local authorities have lost children from a dozen African countries including Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. The Middle East and Asia are equally well represented, with missing under-18s from Iraq, Afghanistan, China and India. From Europe, young Moldovans, Albanians and Romanians have gone missing.

Richard Ross, the manager of the unit for child asylum seekers at Solihull, which includes Birmingham airport, said he often feels "powerless" to stop traffickers spiriting children away.

"We are in competition with traffickers," he said. "They exert a powerful pull over the young people in our care and we have to counter that by offering a better option. There are some traffickers who keep calling them up and it normally doesn't take long for them to succumb."

Save the Children has launched a poster campaign in hospitals and airports asking staff to look out for missing trafficked children. The European commission is understood to be planning an international telephone hotline for victims.

"The government doesn't believe it is necessary to set up a system of guardianship for all unaccompanied asylum children," the Home Office said in a statement, adding that the family courts already provided sufficient protection.

The Government has issued a 14-day closure notice to Charitable Children's Institution (CCI) in Kajiado district for alleged child trafficking.

The home has been accused of trafficking a female child to the United Kingdom while 27 other children at the home have been fostered locally without adherence to the procedures provided for by the law.

It was the trafficking of the little girl, two years ago, that has come back to haunt Huruma Children's Home in Ngong' division after the child was discovered by authorities in London and the matter taken to court.

The closure notice to the home was delivered to the manager Ms. Zipporah Kamau early this week by the Rift Valley provincial Children's Officer Mr. Abdi Sheikh Yusuf on the orders of the Director of children's services, Mr. Ahmed Hussein.

Yusuf was accompanied by senior officials from the CCI secretariat at the department Mrs. Judy Oduor and Ms. Roda Misiko and Kajiado district children's officer Ms. Ruth Mboya.

Prior to the issuance of the closure notice Mr. Yusuf met with the Kajiado Area Advisory Council (AAC) whose members have been attending a training workshop on child trafficking and other forms of child abuse where he asked the members to meet urgently to determine the fate of the children's home and the 145 children at the institution.

The AAC is a multi-sectoral committee that is chaired by the District Commissioner and has a responsibility to supervise and routinely inspect all CCIs in the district.

The Council are also charged with the responsibility of resource mobilization in their respective districts to facilitate implementation of projects aimed at improving the welfare of children and usually networks with NGOs and other partners in the private sector.

The AAC is mandated by law to close any CCI in its area of jurisdiction suspected of being involved in malpractices.
The provincial children's officer asked the council to visit all charitable children's institutions in the district and scrutinize records of children in order to establish if illegal practices like child trafficking were taking place.

A recent inspection of the Huruma Children's Home by a team from the CCI secretariat revealed that the institution lacked safety guidelines, did not maintain proper records for the children while a majority of the children had not been committed to the home through a court of law.

The home was found to be congested and the inspection team recommended re-integration of some of the children with their guardians and families.

SRI Lankan officials have arrested three people when they uncovered a child-trafficking racket after three children were deported from Singapore for having false documents.

The Child Protection Authority of Sri Lanka today said investigations were underway to find the people behind the child smuggling, which had taken place over several months, adding the group had smuggled "a considerable number'' of children.

"We have arrested three people and the investigations are going on,''  authority chairman Jagath Wellawattha said.

Mr Wellawattha said the investigations began when Singapore authorities deported three children, an 11-year-old girl and two 16-year-old boys, who had tried to go to Britain on forged Malaysian passports.

The children were taken from Sri Lanka to Malaysia where false Malaysian passports were prepared for them to enter Britain via Singapore, Mr Wellawattha said.

The NSPCC is targeting hospitals and transport companies in Wiltshire in a bid to help children and young people brought into the UK illegally for exploitation.

Posters have been sent to accident and emergency departments, and bus and coach services in the city asking staff to keep a lookout for vulnerable children.

Anyone who suspects a child or young person has been trafficked is being urged to call a dedicated free helpline- 0800 107 7057 to report their concerns.

Manager of the NSPCC National Child Trafficking Advice and Information Line, Mandy John-Baptiste, said: "Many children are not told the truth about why they are being brought to this country.

"They may think they are coming for a better life but, in fact, end up being abused and exploited by being forced to sell sex, become domestic slaves or used in benefit fraud.

"Our aim is to work with other agencies to make sure they get a proper assessment and protection before they become invisible to the authorities. This can happen very quickly so we are appealing to anyone who might come across them at the various stages of their journeys - immigration officers, coach drivers, nurses- to be alert.

"These children are brought in with false identification documents, are usually separated from their families and rarely registered with GPs. This means they frequently turn-up in hospital accident and emergency departments.

"It's a problem that needs urgent action but we can only help them if people call us when they have suspicions about a child."

Posters bearing the message - Has a child you know been misled about why they came to this country? - have been sent to bus and coach stations and hospitals in Wiltshire.

Since the National Child Trafficking Advice and Information Line opened last September, it has helped around 60 children aged 18 months to 18 who have been trafficked from across the globe.