UNICEF Announces Anti-War Agenda : Children: On its 50th anniversary, the agency calls for a global ban on land mines. They kill or injure 60 victims every day, many of them youngsters.

Half a century after it was created to feed young survivors of World War II, the United Nations Children’s Fund on Monday unveiled an activist anti-war agenda--including a call for a global ban on land mines--to help new generations of scarred children.

Carol Bellamy, UNICEF’s executive director, said the 10-point agenda will “dramatically improve the well-being of children in situations of conflict.”

Launching the report, “The State of the World’s Children,” the Nobel Prize-winning agency lamented “a terrible symmetry” between its initial postwar concerns and those that will govern its work into the next century.

“Now, 50 years later, UNICEF is again confronted with the need to assist children ravaged by war emergencies across the globe,” the report notes.

Bellamy, an American and former director of the Peace Corps, said mortality among children has been halved--about 12.5 million a year who could have been helped still die, she said--since UNICEF’s inception and that basic immunization has saved the lives of 20 million children since 1980.

“The progress is tremendous . . . but we are also worried,” Bellamy told reporters here. “We know that all the progress made on behalf of children--the lives saved, schools and clinics built--is lost all too easily in war. We can’t vaccinate against war. But we must, as a world, do something.”

Of particular concern are the 110 million land mines sown in 64 countries. They are cheap to make ($3 to $10 per mine), expensive to deactivate ($300 to $1,000 per mine) and represent disaster in waiting.

Since 1975, UNICEF says, mines have killed or maimed about 1 million people and continue to claim about 60 victims every day, sometimes killing children who were not even born when the mine was laid. In El Salvador, 75% of mine victims are children; in Angola, most of the country’s 20,000 amputees are women and children.

“We will work for an international law banning the production, use, stockpiling, sale and export of these weapons,” Bellamy said. The agency says it will boycott any company involved in the manufacture or sale of land mines.

The UNICEF report grimly documents war’s ever greater proportional toll on children and their parents: In World War I, soldiers did the dying; civilians accounted for 14% of casualties. But in World War II, 70% of the dead were civilians, and by 1990, with wars increasingly within countries rather than between them, the figure had risen to nearly 90%.

“Wars are not going to disappear, but we can at least mitigate their effects and ensure that they do not target children,” Bellamy said.

“It is not a grandiose scheme to bring peace in our time. But it is a vital starting point for lessening the toll of war on children,” she said.

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In addition to the land-mine ban, the agenda also proposes vigorous international monitoring of human rights and implacable pursuit of war criminals.

“Recent years have seen the most barbaric acts of violence against children and other civilians. These must be denounced as they are revealed. International war crimes tribunals must have both the support and the resources to bring perpetrators to justice,” the UNICEF report says.

UNICEF also demands greater specific international protections for girls and women “because of the terrible threat they face of sexual violence and rape.”

In addition, an agency that began distributing dried milk to European children in 1946 and now distributes about $800 million in aid around the world yearly, asks for an international ban on recruitment of children under age 18 as soldiers.

In conflict, combatants should recognize children as “zones of peace,” UNICEF says. Temporary cease-fires to allow children to be vaccinated, or to allow safe delivery of food, should be raised to a tenet of international humanitarian law, the agency insists.

The UNICEF agenda also says that countries that impose sanctions to pressure their enemies should be required to make a “child impact assessment” to gauge, and if necessary modify, the affect of sanctions on children.

“The world must be convinced that whenever or wherever fighting occurs, a safe haven is needed for children,” Bellamy said at a news conference with actor Peter Ustinov, a UNICEF volunteer for more than two decades.

Teaching that differences can be resolved without violence is another UNICEF message to the international community, part of its conviction that the world needs to more resolutely address “the underlying causes of violence, including poverty, and to invest resources in mediation and conflict resolution.”

“Many of today’s most intractable disputes, for all the ethnic or religious character they acquire, are at heart struggles for resources and for survival,” Bellamy said.