{"id":102199,"date":"2013-12-31T14:33:16","date_gmt":"2013-12-31T14:33:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/children-among-victims-as-brutal-violence-grips-central-african-republic\/"},"modified":"2013-12-31T14:33:16","modified_gmt":"2013-12-31T14:33:16","slug":"children-among-victims-as-brutal-violence-grips-central-african-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/children-among-victims-as-brutal-violence-grips-central-african-republic\/","title":{"rendered":"Children Among Victims as Brutal Violence Grips Central African Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"

An MSF staff assisting a mother and her child in a triaging area of a camp close to Bangui airport. (Photo: Samuel Hanryon\/MSF)<\/span><\/span>UNICEF has issued an urgent call from the Central African Republic where a month of growing violence and political unrest has now culminated in reports of children being ‘beheaded and mutilated’ as warring factions collide.<\/p>\n

According<\/a> to the UN agency charged with protecting and fostering child welfare across the globe, the killings of at least 16 children\u2013at least two of whom were beheaded\u2013have been confirmed in CAR’s capital city of Bangui since fighting broke out on December 5th. Another 60 children, according to UNICEF, have suffered grave injuries amid the violence that has received scant international attention.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are witnessing unprecedented levels of violence against children. More and more children are being recruited into armed groups, and they are also being directly targeted in atrocious revenge attacks,\u201d said Souleymane Diabate, UNICEF Representative in CAR.<\/p>\n

“Targeted attacks against children are a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law and must stop immediately. Concrete action is needed now to prevent violence against children,” Diabate said.<\/p>\n

The international doctors group Medicine Sans Frontier (Doctors Without Borders), has also issued pleas<\/a> for a reduction in violence and better protections for vulnerable civilians and medical staff trying to treat the wounded. MSF staff report the situation in the capital city as “out of control” as fighting, lynchings, and violent attacks escalated over recent days.<\/p>\n

“We have been receiving more patients with serious injuries at the H\u00c3\u00b4pital Communautaire the last few days,\u201d said Laurent Sury, MSF’s emergency coordinator in Bangui. \u201cPeople are coming in with machete wounds to the head, hands and arms \u2014 injuries sustained as they tried to defend themselves. We’ve also seen people who have been stabbed, sometimes multiple times, in the abdomen, and people who have been either tortured or brutally beaten. We have even had a case of impalement. For the most part, these are young men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though both France and the African Union have sent peacekeeping forces to CAR it remains unclear how a reduction in bloodshed can be achieved under current conditions.<\/p>\n

Violence continued in Bangui on Monday and into Tuesday as shelling intensified and journalists reported<\/a> chaos at the airport as people, both foreigners and Central Africans, tried to board emergency flights out of the country.<\/p>\n

Though framed by many Western media outlets as a sectarian-fueled conflict between Muslim and Christian factions, Al-Jazeera America<\/em> reports<\/a> that “the bloodshed has little to do with religion \u2013 in a nation where Muslims and Christians have long lived in peace \u2013 and instead blame a political battle for control of resources in one of Africa’s most weakly governed states.”<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________________<\/p>\n

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.<\/p>\n

Source: Common Dreams<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An MSF staff assisting a mother and her child in a triaging area of a camp close to Bangui airport. (Photo: Samuel Hanryon\/MSF)UNICEF has issued an urgent call from the Central African Republic where a month of growing violence and political unrest has now culminated in reports of children being ‘beheaded and mutilated’ as warring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":102200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-102199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}