AfricaPress-mozambique: Save the Children was on Friday shocked by the news of the beheading of two boys, aged 15, last Sunday in Palma, Cabo Delgado province, northern Mozambique, the scene of armed attacks.
The boys were killed along with two adults, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of the independent magazine “Carta de Moçambique”.
According to the newspaper’s sources, the children were part of a group of 15 people who had set out from the town of Quitunda, about 15 kilometres from Palma, in search of food.
“We are horrified and outraged by this senseless crime. Children should never be a target in conflict. These were two teenagers with their lives ahead of them, and yet they were killed while trying to meet their most basic needs, looking for food”, said Chance Briggs, Save the Children’s Director in Mozambique.
“Once again we are reminded, in the most brutal way, that the conflict in Cabo Delgado is a war on children. It is having a continuous, horrendous and deadly impact on children”.
According to Chance Briggs, “grave violations are being committed against children – they are being killed, they are being abducted, they are being recruited for use by armed groups.”
“The perpetrators of this violence must be held accountable,” he stressed.
According to him, at least 364,000 children have been “forced to flee their homes and seek shelter in camps for displaced persons or in crowded homes” in the southern part of the region.
He added that these children “lack access to health care and clean water, making them more exposed to deadly diseases such as cholera and malaria”.
Chance Briggs made an appeal: “The world needs to step forward and help the children of Cabo Delgado. We call on the donor community to ensure that funding for children’s needs is prioritised. Funds are urgently needed for protection, for health, for education, for mental health.”
“All parties to this conflict must ensure that children are never targeted” and “must do everything in their power to minimise civilian harm, including ending indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks against children,” he argued.
Chance Briggs said there should be “greater monitoring of these violations, including through the Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, so that perpetrators of violence against children can be held accountable”.
Armed groups have terrorised Cabo Delgado since 2017, with some attacks claimed by the ‘jihadist’ group Islamic State, in a conflict that has claimed more than 2,800 lives according to the ACLED conflict registration project and 732,000 displaced according to the United Nations
