Children Carry Guns for a U.S. Ally, Somalia

(video on site)

MOGADISHU, Somalia — Awil Salah Osman prowls the streets of this shattered city, looking like so many other boys, with ripped-up clothes, thin limbs and eyes eager for attention and affection.

But Awil is different in two notable ways: he is shouldering a fully automatic, fully loaded Kalashnikov assault rifle; and he is working for a military that is substantially armed and financed by the United States.

“You!” he shouts at a driver trying to sneak past his checkpoint, his cherubic face turning violently angry.

“You know what I'm doing here!” He shakes his gun menacingly. “Stop your car!”

The driver halts immediately. In Somalia , lives are lost quickly, and few want to take their chances with a moody 12-year-old.

It is well known that Somalia's radical Islamist insurgents are plucking children off soccer fields and turning them into fighters. But Awil is not a rebel. He is working for Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, a critical piece of the American counterterrorism strategy in the Horn of Africa.

According to Somali human rights groups and United Nations officials, the Somali government, which relies on assistance from the West to survive, is fielding hundreds of children or more on the front lines, some as young as 9.

Child soldiers are deployed across the globe, but according to the United Nations, the Somali government is among the “ most persistent violators ” of sending children into war, finding itself on a list with notorious rebel groups like the Lord's Resistance Army .

Somali government officials concede that they have not done the proper vetting. Officials also revealed that the United States government was helping pay their soldiers, an arrangement American officials confirmed, raising the possibility that the wages for some of these child combatants may have come from American taxpayers.

United Nations officials say they have offered the Somali government specific plans to demobilize the children. But Somalia's leaders, struggling for years to withstand the insurgents' advances, have been paralyzed by bitter infighting and are so far unresponsive.

Several American officials also said that they were concerned about the use of child soldiers and that they were pushing their Somali counterparts to be more careful. But when asked how the American government could guarantee that American money was not being used to arm children, one of the officials said, “I don't have a good answer for that.”

According to Unicef , only two countries have not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child , which prohibits the use of soldiers younger than 15: the United States and Somalia.

Many human rights groups find this unacceptable, and President Obama himself, when this issue was raised during his campaign, did not disagree.

“It is embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land,” he said.

All across this lawless land, smooth, hairless faces peek out from behind enormous guns. In blown-out buildings, children chamber bullets twice the size of their fingers. In neighborhoods by the sea, they run checkpoints and face down four-by-four trucks, though they can barely see over the hood.

Somali government officials admit that in the rush to build a standing army, they did not discriminate.

“I'll be honest,” said a Somali government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the subject, “we were trying to find anyone who could carry a gun.”

Awil struggles to carry his. It weighs about 10 pounds. The strap digs into his bony shoulders, and he is constantly shifting it from one side to the other with a grimace.

Sometimes he gets a helping hand from his comrade Ahmed Hassan, who is 15. Ahmed said he was sent to Uganda more than two years ago for army training, when he was 12, though his claim could not be independently verified. American military advisers have been helping oversee the training of Somali government soldiers in Uganda.

“One of the things I learned,” Ahmed explained eagerly, “is how to kill with a knife.”

Children do not have many options in Somalia. After the government collapsed in 1991, an entire generation was let loose on the streets. Most children have never sat in a classroom or played in a park. Their bones have been stunted by conflict-induced famines, their psyches damaged by all the killings they have witnessed.

“What do I enjoy?” Awil asked. “I enjoy the gun.”

Like many other children here, the war has left him hard beyond his years. He loves cigarettes and is addicted to qat, a bitter leaf that, for the few hours he chews it each day, makes grim reality fade away.

He was abandoned by parents who fled to Yemen, he said, and joined a militia when he was about 7. He now lives with other government soldiers in a dive of a house littered with cigarette boxes and smelly clothes. Awil does not know exactly how old he is. His commander says he is around 12, but birth certificates are rare.

Awil gobbles down greasy rice with unwashed hands because he does not know where his next meal is coming from. He is paid about $1.50 a day, but only every now and then, like most soldiers. His bed is a fly-covered mattress that he shares with two other child soldiers, Ali Deeq, 10, and Abdulaziz, 13.

“He should be in school,” said Awil's commander, Abdisalam Abdillahi. “But there is no school.”

Ali Sheikh Yassin, vice-chairman of Elman Peace and Human Rights Center in Mogadishu, said that about 20 percent of government troops (thought to number 5,000 to 10,000) were children and that about 80 percent of the rebels were. The leading insurgent group, which has drawn increasingly close to Al Qaeda , is called the Shabab , which means youth in Arabic.

“These kids can be so easily brainwashed,” Mr. Ali said. “They don't even have to be paid.”

One of the myriad dangers Awil faces is constant gunfire between his squad and another group of government soldiers from a different clan. The Somali government is racked by divisions from the prime minister's office down to the street.

“I've lost hope,” said Sheik Yusuf Mohamed Siad, a defense minister who abruptly quit in the past week, like several other ministers. “All this international training, it's just training soldiers for the Shabab,” he added, saying defections had increased.

“Go ask the president what he's accomplished in the past year,” Sheik Yusuf said, laughing. “Absolutely nothing.”

Advisers to President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed say they have fine-tuned their plans for a coming offensive, making it more of a gradual military operation to slowly take the city back from the insurgents.

Awil is eager for action. His commanders say he has already proven himself fighting against the Shabab, who used to bully him in the market.

“That made me want to join the T.F.G.,” he said. “With them, I feel like I am amongst my brothers.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/africa/14somalia.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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New Rules on Changes to Benefits

WASHINGTON — The White House on Monday will issue new rules that strongly discourage employers from cutting health insurance benefits or increasing the costs of coverage to employees, administration officials say.

The rules limit the changes that employers can make if they want to be exempt from certain provisions of the health care law passed by Congress in March. Many employers want the exemption because it allows them to keep their existing health plans intact with a minimum of changes. More than 170 million Americans have employer-sponsored insurance.

The administration said the rules would allow a smooth transition to a new, more competitive insurance market that works better for consumers. But in some respects, the rules appear to fall short of the sweeping commitments President Obama made while trying to reassure the public in the fight over health legislation.

In issuing the rules, the administration said this was just one goal of the legislation, allowing people to “keep their current coverage if they like it.” It acknowledged that some people, especially those who work at smaller businesses, might face significant changes in the terms of their coverage, and it said they should be able to “reap the benefits of additional consumer protections.”

The law provides a partial exemption for certain health plans in existence on March 23, when Mr. Obama signed the legislation. Under this provision, known as a grandfather clause, plans can lose the exemption if they make significant changes in deductibles, co-payments or benefits.

About half of employer-sponsored health plans will see such changes by the end of 2013, the administration says in an economic analysis of the rules.

The rules allow employers and insurers to increase benefits. But, in a summary of the rules, the administration said, “Plans will lose their grandfather status if they choose to make significant changes that reduce benefits or increase costs to consumers.”

Some provisions of the new law apply to all health plans. In general, they cannot cancel coverage when a person becomes ill, and they cannot impose lifetime limits on benefits.

But “grandfathered health plans” are exempt from other requirements. In general, they do not have to provide “essential health benefits” specified by the federal government and they do not have to provide free preventive care.

Under the rules, a health insurance plan can lose its exemption if it eliminates all benefits for a particular condition or if it increases deductibles or co-payments by more than the rate of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points.

Likewise, a health plan loses its exemption if an employer reduces its contribution so that its share of the total cost of coverage declines by more than 5 percentage points. If, for example, an employer is paying 60 percent of the cost of family coverage, it would run afoul of the rules if it cut its share to 50 percent.

An employer would also lose its exempt status if it increased co-payments for doctor's visits to $45, from $30 — a 50 percent increase — while medical inflation was 8 percent.

Some health plans require consumers to pay a percentage of the bill, rather than a fixed dollar amount. An insurer loses its special protection if it makes any increase in this percentage — if, for example, it requires patients to pay 25 percent of the bill for surgery, rather than the 20 percent charged in the past.

A health plan would also run afoul of the rules if it eliminated coverage for services needed to diagnose or treat a particular condition. As an example, the rules describe a health plan that covers a combination of counseling and prescription drugs for treatment of a particular mental illness. The plan would lose its exemption if it eliminated benefits for counseling.

Some insurers cap the amount they will pay for covered services each year. If they want to retain their grandfathered status, they cannot reduce any annual dollar limit that was in place on March 23.

About 133 million Americans are in group health plans from employers with 100 or more employees, the administration said, and most “will not see major changes to their coverage as a result of this regulation.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/health/policy/14health.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Day Labor and Free Speech

Cities and suburbs across America have tried to muscle immigrant day laborers off the sidewalk, passing laws that prohibit job solicitation in public places and enforcing them with ticketing and arrest sweeps. Federal courts have repeatedly struck down these laws, recognizing that the First Amendment protects all people who want to speak freely and assemble peaceably.

That streak of successes had a discouraging setback last week in California when a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a misguided ordinance from the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach. The ordinance forbids anyone “to stand on a street or highway and solicit, or attempt to solicit, employment, business or contributions from an occupant of any motor vehicle.” It forbids drivers to “stop, park or stand a motor vehicle” while trying to hire somebody.

The majority bought the argument that the law was a carefully written attempt to prevent men, cars and trucks from mixing dangerously in the middle of the street. It cited an earlier ruling on a law in Phoenix that prohibited members of the community group Acorn from approaching cars stopped at red lights to ask for change.

The problem, as Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote in dissent , is that the Redondo Beach ordinance isn't a narrowly tailored constraint to ensure smooth traffic flow. It is a broad, indiscriminate assault on all manner of legitimate speech and conduct.

It doesn't just ban soliciting on streets and highways, but also on “roadways, parkways, medians, alleys, sidewalks, curbs and public ways.” “The plain language of the statute,” Judge Wardlaw wrote, went unconstitutionally overboard; it could, as written, apply to a girl scout selling cookies or a restaurant employee passing out fliers.

Redondo Beach obviously wasn't going after girl scouts or restaurants. Like so many dozens of other places, including Oyster Bay and Suffolk County on Long Island, it was trying to drive away immigrant day laborers. Lack of immigration status does not strip away a person's basic constitutional rights.

The panel's deplorable decision is one the full circuit court should hear and overturn. Redondo Beach has perfectly justifiable laws that prohibit running into the street, jaywalking, driving recklessly and harassing drivers and pedestrians. It should enforce those, and leave the day laborers — and the Constitution — alone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/opinion/14mon2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Parade Magazine

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http://www.parade.com/news/backpage/david-gergen/100613-a-smart-exception.html

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