Congolese child soldiers shock former war correspondent Martin Bell, Indonesia warns of a tsunami that never arrived, the human face of Lebanon's crisis, propaganda by SMS and fish from heaven...

A chance for Congo's children?

It's a truism that children bear the brunt of conflict, and it's probably truer than anywhere in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Half a million Congolese children under the age of five die each year, mostly from disease and malnutrition, according to the U.N. children's fund (UNICEF). Hunger, violence and displacement are a daily reality in the anarchic east of the country.

Many who make it past the ripe old age of five find themselves toiling in diamond mines or recruited into jungle militias. Almost half of primary-school-age children - about 4.7 million - don't go to school.

In six days, Congolese vote in their first free elections in 40 years - polls that many hope will mark a new beginning after decades of war, chaos and misgovernance. But a "Child Alert" report released today by UNICEF is a reminder of the long road ahead. There are no new figures here, but the old ones are appalling enough: 1,200 children killed each day, over half of them children.

Martin Bell, a British former BBC war correspondent who wrote the report, travelled to eastern Congo as a UNICEF ambassador earlier this year. His audio and video reports are available online.

"It was the most shocking experience of my life," he told a press conference in London today. "I was particularly shocked by the use of rape as a weapon of war ... and by the grim phenomenon of child soldiers."

Last year, 25,000 cases of rape were reported in eastern Congo, but the actual number is likely to be exponentially higher. UNICEF describes sexual violence as having reached "epidemic proportions". It says gang rape and sexual mutilation are routinely used by warring groups to humiliate, intimidate and tear communities apart. Victims of sexual violence are often rejected by their families and villages.

"There is no problem more acute than the predicament of girls and women who become mothers as a result of rape," Bell said.

I asked Anthony Bloomberg, UNICEF's Congo representative, what the international community was doing to address the psychosocial toll of such horrors. He said the challenge was to try to get young survivors of sexual violence into school where they can benefit from the "normalising role of education".

That's a mammoth task in a country where many people live on less than 40 cents a day and there's no free primary education. Even so, UNICEF hopes to get 1.5 million children enrolled when the new school year starts in September.

Children recruited into armed forces as fighters, cooks, porters or sex slaves also benefit from going to school if and when they are finally demobilised.

Exact figures are impossible to come by, but Congo is thought to have the largest concentration of child soldiers in the world. UNICEF estimates that about 30,000 children were recruited by armed forces or militia groups at the height of Congo's 1998-2003 war, the world's deadliest conflict since World War Two.

Will the elections change these children's lives? Hopes and expectations are high, but so are the risks of back-sliding into violence. Then there are the huge challenges - from providing livelihoods to communities shattered by war and bringing food, water and sanitation to remote communities, to bolstering the security sector in a country the size of Western Europe...

"Conflict and poverty have weakened natural protection mechanisms for kids," UNICEF's Bloomberg said. But he added that 40 years of chaos had forced local communities to develop coping mechanisms - often centred around churches - that could play a crucial healing role.

"The idea that nothing exists there is incorrect," he said. "You have networks. Yes, they're weak. Yes, the quality of staff is variable. They're lacking a lot of things...

"You have a combination of civil society support and civil service in action. You'll need several decades of reinforcement to get it up to standard, but you have something to start with."

Tim Large
AlertNet Deputy Editor

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Tsunami alerts: a tough call

To warn or not to warn? When it comes to quakes that could cause tsunamis, it seems to be a particularly tough question - and one that can spark confusion, as seen in Indonesia on Sunday.

Less than a week after a deadly wave killed around 600 people in Java (where no warnings were received locally), another powerful undersea quake struck off the coast of Sulawesi island. Indonesia's meteorological agency put the magnitude at 6.6, and issued a tsunami warning.

Local officials alerted the coastal population and some were evacuated to higher ground. A resident of Gorontalo province on Sulawesi island told the Jakarta Post that people had started to panic, fleeing low-lying areas. He added that many residents had already left town a couple of days ago after being told they were in a high-risk tsunami area.

It turned out that there was no tsunami and, in fact, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu hadn't issued an alert because it put the magnitude of the Sulawesi quake at around 6.1 - below its warning threshold of 6.5.

With the Java quake, the key problem was that while regional tsunami warnings were issued, they didn't reach local people in time. In Sulawesi, warnings got through, but with the discrepancy in magnitude measurements, local and regional views on the likelihood of a tsunami were at odds.

Still, surely it's more important for warnings to be issued when there's any risk of a tsunami than not. With Sunday's quake, Indonesian officials seem to have decided to take no chances following the difficulties experienced in Java.

Plans for comprehensive national, regional and even global tsunami warning systems are still being rolled out - and major gaps remain as the Java tsunami tragically highlighted.

Disaster experts often stress that local knowledge about how to act in the face of natural hazards is equally as important as high-tech forecasting and alerting systems. In Sulawesi, this weekend, it seems local people were acting on what they'd seen and heard about other tsunamis that have hit Indonesia.

But they may also have been helped by an alert issued by the Gorontalo provincial governor on the MetroTV news channel, less than 15 minutes after the Indonesian Meterology and Geophysics Agency sent out text messages to the media.

The deputy chief editor told the Jakarta Post that the station had decided to increase its public service efforts in an attempt to prevent casualties in the wake of disasters, and is now allowing quake-related news to interrupt any show.

According to the paper, closer cooperation with the media is being viewed as a way to pass information on to local people while the government is still working on its early warning system.

Certainly, TV news flashes about quakes and tsunamis seem to work fairly well in Japan, with everyone switching on as soon as they feel tremors. This method does rely on people having access to TV sets, as well as the continued functioning of communications networks - neither of which can be guaranteed.

Still, while early warning systems may never be perfect, it looks like Indonesia is starting to make a little progress in getting the message out beyond its government offices.

Megan Rowling
AlertNet journalist

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The human face of Lebanon's crisis

The humanitarian crisis in Lebanon is growing, and those most affected are the hundreds of thousands displaced by the fighting and those still living in the south now cut off from the rest of the country.

Here's a round-up of reports on the humanitarian situation from the U.S., British and Lebanese press.

There's also a good overview in an Aljazeera interview with the Middle East spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Nada Doumani.

Propaganda by SMS

Israel is trying to win hearts and minds via SMS and voicemail, as well as the more old-fashioned methods of radio and leaflets dropped from passing planes.

The Irish Times says residents of the southern city of Tyre awoke last week to a voice-mail on their mobile phones warning them to leave the area immediately.

But more often they get text messages about Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, such as one claiming he's preparing a secure bunker for himself in Syria.

Leaflets dropped on south Lebanon portray him as a coward hiding in a cave leaving Lebanese civilians to bear the consequences of his actions, or a cobra dancing to Iran and Syria's tune.

Israeli forces have also resurrected the old Voice of Lebanon radio station, once operated by Israel's military ally the South Lebanon Army before it was defeated by Hizbullah in 2000.

Fish from heaven

A bizarre thing is happening in India's Kerala state. Aptly named Manna village received a heaven-sent package of food last week.

As the clouds opened, villagers said they saw pencil-thin fish falling from the sky. One local shop keeper said he collected 30 of them, all conveniently chilled.

Apparently this has happened elsewhere too. Other things to have rained down include tomatoes and frogs, sucked up from terra firma by whirlwinds or waterspouts and then dropped once the wind fell.

So maybe the phrase "raining cats and dogs" could have some literal truth to it...

Alex Whiting
AlertNet journalist