Tag Archive for: Afghanistan

thumbnail

Afghanistan vows to “set standards” on Child Labor in Mines

By Michelle Nichols

KABUL

(Reuters) – For around $2 a day some Afghan children as young as 10 work long hours in the country’s coal mines with no safety gear and, until now, no government mining policy to protect them.

While national law allows Afghan children to work up to 35 hours a week from the age of 14, they are not allowed to do hazardous jobs such as mining. But after 30 years of conflict and with many children the sole family breadwinners, aid and rights groups say the laws are flouted and not enforced.

As Afghanistan tries to attract foreign investors to develop an estimated $3 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits, Mines Minister Wahidullah Shahrani has been working to expand and clean up the industry and has drafted a policy officially setting the minimum age for coal mine workers at 18.

“We drafted the first-ever social policy guidelines to make sure that when it comes to the labor force, and when it comes to health and safety, and most importantly on the issue of child labor, we will have some type of standards,” he told Reuters.

“Previously we did not have any official policy at the Ministry of Mines.”

The guidelines are due to be implemented in the next few months and mining inspectors would be employed to ensure the rules are upheld, Shahrani said. But critics have questioned the government’s capacity to manage the mining industry.

Since Shahrani became minister at the start of 2010, he has drawn up the ministry’s first business plan and signed Afghanistan to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) as a candidate country. He was optimistic that by April 2012 Afghanistan would get full EITI compliant status.

Afghanistan’s rich mineral deposits have been trumpeted as the key to future prosperity, but experts say the bounty is many years, even decades, away and point to massive security and infrastructure challenges for potential investors.

The country however has already awarded a contract to China’s top copper producer, Jiangxi Copper Co, and China Metallurgical Group Corp for the big Aynak mine south of Kabul.

Shahrani is due to award another large contract in November for what the government describes as Asia’s largest untapped iron ore deposit, the Hajigak mine, that straddles the provinces of Bamiyan, Parwan and Maidan Wardak.

CHILD LABOR WIDESPREAD

About 200 children were recently found working in coal mines in central Bamiyan province, according to separate studies by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and by the Child Protection Action Network, a joint initiative with aid groups including the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, where children make up half the population, and a quarter of children die before the age of five.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission found that children were working in some mines run by the government, which Shahrani acknowledged, although he said there was “not that many.” He blamed 30 years of conflict for pushing impoverished families to allow children to work in mines.

“All those years have been a difficult period for the people,” he said.

The U.S. Geological Survey has found Afghanistan has “moderate to potentially abundant” coal resources, although most of it is relatively deep or currently inaccessible.

It is mainly used for powering small industries — such as cement production, textile manufacturing and food processing — and as a primary source of household fuel, it said.

Child labor in Afghanistan is not restricted to mining.

There are about 1.2 million Afghan children in part- or full-time work, the government says, in a country where war, poverty, widespread unemployment and a preference for large families have created a huge underage labor market.

A 2010 study by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission found that an even larger portion of the country’s 15 million children — up to 40 percent — were likely to be engaged in some sort of paid work.

Abdul Ahad Farzam, head of the commission in Bamiyan, said because many mines were often located in remote areas where children are exposed to the dangers associated with coal mining — cancer and respiratory illnesses caused by the dust and gases, which can also cause underground explosions.

“We are afraid of child abuse because they stay all night and day there together (at the mines),” he said.

(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Paul Tait and Ed Lane)

thumbnail

UN Secretary General Calls for Greater Efforts to Tackle Child Rights Violations in Afghanistan



Greater efforts are needed to end grave violations against children in Afghanistan, including their use as child soldiers, sexual violence, killing and maiming, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in a new report to the Security Council.

In his report on children and armed conflict in Afghanistan, covering the period from 1 September 2008 to 30 August 2010, Mr. Ban acknowledges that progress has been made since his last report, especially in terms of dialogue with the Government on the protection of children.

Last month the UN and the Afghan Government signed an agreement in which the country made a commitment to protect children affected by armed conflict and to prevent the recruitment of minors into the national armed forces.

Read more

thumbnail

Afghans Plan to Stop Recruiting Children as Police & Protect Sex Slaves

[From the New York Times:}

By ROD NORDLAND

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan is expected to sign a formal agreement with the United Nations on Sunday to stop the recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders, according to Afghan and United Nations officials.

The effort by Afghanistan’s international backers to rapidly expand the country’s police and military forces has had the unintended consequence of drawing many under-age boys into service, the officials conceded.

Stung by Afghanistan’s inclusion on the United Nations’ blacklist of countries where child soldiers are commonly used, like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda, government leaders are expected to sign an undertaking with Radhika Coomaraswamy, the secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, during her visit to Kabul on Sunday, the officials said.

With the agreement on an action plan to combat the problem, the government will for the first time officially acknowledge the problem of child sex slaves. As part of the Afghan tradition of bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” boys as young as 9 are dressed as girls and trained to dance for male audiences, then prostituted in an auction to the highest bidder. Many powerful men, particularly commanders in the military and the police, keep such boys, often dressed in uniforms, as constant companions for sexual purposes.

United Nations officials say they believe that there are hundreds of cases of under-age boys in the police, “mostly because of falsification of papers, also bribes, and there’s been a big push to get the numbers up,” one official said.

Afghanistan hopes that its participation in the action plan will lead to the removal of the Afghan National Police from the list of organizations condemned by the United Nations for using children in armed conflict. The others in Afghanistan also include the Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Islamic Party, insurgent groups that often use children to hide bombs, and in some cases to act as suicide bombers.

In all, 13 countries are on the United Nations list of those with “grave violations against children in armed conflict.” In most of those countries, however, the organizations responsible are rebels and insurgents, rather than the national police or military.

NATO officials have been aware of the recruitment problem for some time, and the former military commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, issued an order in 2010 warning troops to be on the lookout for under-age recruits. NATO trainers hope to add an additional 23,000 police officers by next October, part of a planned 42 percent increase in the country’s security forces by 2012.

Asked about the military’s policy regarding commanders who abuse children, a spokesman for the NATO-led military alliance, Lt. Col. John L. Dorrian, said that if any members of the military encountered such abuse they would be obliged to report it. But in the past year, he said, he was not aware of any such reports.

The custom, at least 300 years old in Central Asia, remains notoriously widespread in parts of Afghanistan. The former governor of Kandahar Province, Gul Agha Shirzai, an ex-warlord and close ally of the Americans who is now the governor of Nangarhar Province, has been seen at many public events with teenaged boys or young men with heavy makeup, although a spokesman for his office has denied that they were bacha bazi.

“The practice of bacha bazi and sexual abuse against boys is also a matter of concern,” Ms. Coomaraswamy said in a report to the Security Council last April. “The general climate of impunity, and the vacuum in rule of law, has adversely affected the reporting of sexual violence and abuse against children.”

Ms. Coomaraswamy found a strong ally in Afghanistan at the influential Ulema Council, the highest religious body in the country, which condemns both the recruitment of children and their sexual abuse as un-Islamic. The head of the United Nations Mission in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, also lobbied officials about it, after receiving 4,000 petitions condemning the lack of efforts to end child sexual abuse in the security forces, officials said.

The practice of bacha bazi is known throughout Afghanistan but is particularly notorious in Kandahar. The Taliban originally came to prominence in Kandahar when they intervened in a fight between two pedophile warlords over the possession of a coveted dancing boy. The Taliban also oppose the practice, and banned it when they were in power.

“While in many areas of southern Afghanistan such treatment of boys appears to be shrouded in some sense of secrecy, in Kandahar it constitutes an openly celebrated cultural tradition,” a Pentagon consultant wrote in a report on Pashtun sexuality prepared for British and American troops in 2009.

Asila Wardak, the head of human rights issues at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and one of the authors of the plan agreed to with the United Nations, said President Hamid Karzai had ordered his government to tackle the issue because he was disturbed to see “Afghanistan put on the black list of the U.N.”

“There are a lot of measures to combat the sexual abuse of children,” she said, including specific provision for the prosecution of commanders found complicit. The problem of bacha bazi, she said, “has existed since time I can remember, but this is the first time the government is taking practical steps against it.”

thumbnail

Afghanistan: Child Laborers Miss School, Face Spiral Of Poverty

by Ron Synovitz
An Afghan child on the streets of Kabul (RFE/RL)

June 11, 2007 (RFE/RL) — Hasib is a 12-year-old Afghan boy who spends his days working at a bicycle repair shop in Kabul. He says he considers himself lucky because he is learning a trade that he will have for life. But since he started the job at the age of nine, he has had to quit school. And he does not know how to read or write.

I’m fixing this bicycle, so I’ve just unscrewed these handlebars,” Hasib tells RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan. “I’ve been working here for the past three years. I had to learn how to do this work. My hands would get hurt very badly at first, until I learned how to do it. I got burned until I learned how. I had to work a lot to learn and become someone.”

Read more