“I stand here today as a former child soldier, forcefully recruited during the civil conflict that decimated over 50,000 of my compatriots…I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the critical support of the ICRC and the international community,” Musa Timothy Kabba told Members of the informal visit of UN Security Council members to the Palais des Nations.
Seventy-five years after the ratification of the Geneva Conventions, a former child soldier-turned-foreign affairs minister of Sierra Leone, Alhaji Musa Timothy Kabba, has narrated to the Security Council gathered in Geneva on Monday that the ‘Rules of War’ in the Geneva Conventions saved his life during 1991-2002 civil war.
He, therefore, urged greater international support for the key accords, highlighting their importance in rehabilitating him and tens of thousands of his fellow compatriots following the country’s bitter civil war.
“I stand here today as a former child soldier, forcefully recruited during the civil conflict that decimated over 50,000 of my compatriots…I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the critical support of the ICRC and the international community,” Musa Timothy Kabba told Members of the informal visit of UN Security Council members to the Palais des Nations.
He referred to the UN-partner the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in the Swiss city in 1863 to protect and provide humanitarian assistance in line with accords designed to protect people in conflict.
Addressing the forum gathered at UN Geneva to mark the moment in 1949 when the international community revised three earlier Conventions – concerning the protection of soldiers wounded in battle, victims of conflict at sea and prisoners of war, adding a fourth to protect civilians impacted by war – Mr. Kabba said that he “need not dwell upon the trauma of those years” as a young soldier.
“But I do need to acknowledge here today, in this birthplace of modern global humanitarianism, that it was the ICRC which profoundly helped me to overcome…the trauma of my war experience and to be reabsorbed in normal society”, after the country’s civil war in the 1990s, “during which most of the cardinal principles of the Geneva Conventions were violated”.
