The Civil Advocacy Coalition for the Protection of Children in the Tindouf Camps has called on the United Nations and the international community to intervene urgently to protect child victims of forced detention in the camps and protect them from their exploitation in the slavery and for military purposes.
The members of the coalition called on the UN to intervene quickly and redouble their efforts to save these children from recruitment and their exploitation for military purposes in southern Algeria by the Polisario militia.
These appeals come within the framework of the International Day Against Child Soldiers, and as such the Coalition has stressed the need to fight to prevent the recruitment and use of children in conflicts, and to secure their release and ensure their reinstatement.
The members of child protection in the Tindouf camps recalled that the detention of these children and their military recruitment contravenes all the provisions relating to the protection of children and human rights, in particular the Convention against Torture of 1978 , the Convention on the Human Rights of the Child and its optional protocols.
These child soldiers, victims of indoctrination and abuse are formatted to act like killing machines when they should be going to school, playing and living their innocence. Instead, they receive orders and undergo military training, carry weapons and are dehumanized to become human machine guns and serve above all as cannon fodder for the Polisario.
The Coalition has in this sense indicated that the Polisario armed group continues to deprive children of their dignity, to destroy their lives and their future and to prevent hundreds of them from accessing quality education, health care health, the right to family, nationality and the right to play and have fun.
Worse still, these child soldiers, boys and girls, are victims of abuse and sexual exploitation, says the Coalition, noting that some of them are sold as slaves and that little girls are forcibly married off to combatants of groups armed.
Despite the horror of these scenarios that are happening in North Africa and under the eyes of the Algerian government which shelters the armed group of the Polisario, the international community and the NGOs which can have a role in stemming this phenomenon are not committed enough to take concrete action in the fight against this human crime which threatens the lives of millions of children.
The Coalition called on countries legally and politically engaged in the fight against this human crime to have the political audacity to denounce the violations committed by armed and terrorist groups against children in the Tindouf camps.