The Big Picture: Child Soldiers

Warchild.org


This week, I will be taking a break from this daily grind of politics and offer a broader look at a handful of important issues that are having a serious impact on millions of people around the world. Today's topic: child soldiers.

One of the most troubling phenomena is 'modern' warfare is the increased exploitation of young boys to do the fighting (and young girls to serve as sex slaves for the soldiers). While this is a particular problem in some African countries, the plague has also been seen in countries around the world like Sri Lanka, Russia and Colombia. This involves not just 16 or 17 year olds, but children as young as 8.

I became sensitized to this issue when I lived in Guinea, West Africa. Guinea's southern neighbors, Liberia and Sierra Leone, were each in the midst of devastating civil wars, wars in which all sides were accused of using child soldiers to commit atrocities. I believe that the Liberian civil war, which began in 1989, saw the world's first widespread use of child soldiers in conflict. Child soldiers in Sierra Leone, where a a war destroyed that country for most of the 1990s, were forced to be especially brutal, with the rebels there infamous for amputating the arms or hands of victims.

The way in which child soldiers are treated is particularly hideous. Take Sierra Leone. Countless villages were destroyed in the fighting and hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee. Often, families were separated in the chaos. In many cases, children were kidnapped by the rebels and forced to fight. Other times, rebels exploited lost children by offering them food, protection and companionship... in exchange for fighting. Many such children were forced by rebels to kill or rape their own family members or burn their own villages, literally destroying the established order of a very traditional society. This Machiavellian tactic completed the shredding of social cohesion and ensured that child's loyalties would remain with the rebels; after all, chidlren would no longer have a village to go back and their relatives would either be dead or would not want anything to do with them. Many of the worst atrocities in the Sierra Leone war were committed by young children, drugged up by the rebels to eliminate their inhibitions.

While peace has returned to Sierra Leone, it has not yet reached northern Uganda. There, a fanatical pseudo-Christian rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army has kidnapped over 30,000 children for its forces, forced the displacement of over a million and a half people and generally terrorized everyone in the region. An important new documentary called Journey Into the Sunset explores this tragedy. The Invisible Children movement works to help children affected by this war.

Child soldiers are also part of the wars in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, though hopefully the recent elections in the DRC will bring all the madness toward an end. The Salon blog has a moving piece on the efforts to reintegrate child soldiers into Congolese society via song, but a piece tinged by anger about the war's causes.

Not coincidentally, the eastern DRC and northern Uganda are generally considered the two worst humanitarian crises in the world.

Children participating in war is not a new phenomenon. I've read stories of Americans who were 16 and 17 years old joining the Army during World War II. What's new is the scale of the problem and the increasingly young age in which it's occuring. In the past, the guns used in war were somewhat heavy and carried a big kick when fired. As a result, the weight of the rifles necessarily required the soldiers to have a fair degree of upper body strength to use them effectively. In recent years, improved killing technology has made such rifles much lighter. As a consequence, younger children can now use these weapons that would've been too heavy for them in the past.

This is why many conflicts see the widespread participation of pre-adolescent boys, as young as 10 years old in the DRC. In other conflicts, 8 year old soldiers have been reported. Girls are not immune from the violence either as many are kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves.

War inherently strains social cohesion to the break point. The way in which child soldiers are forced to act rips it apart entirely. Child soldiers committed hideous, unspeakable acts but were forced to do so under penalty of death or beating or starvation. They are seen as criminals by the society but are really victims who will be scarred for the rest of their lives just as much the people they committed atrocities against. Furthermore, many of these kids have spent their whole lives with a power and authority that most adults don't have. They are used to getting whatever they want via threat of force. All this makes child soldiers particularly hard to reintegrate into normal society. But since children represent the next generation of teachers, doctors and farmers, it makes their reintegration all the more vital.

There are many organizations working valliantly to facilitate such reintegration such as War Child. But it's an extremely tough job.

In Côte d'Ivoire, carers of the former child soldiers said their charges were violent, excitable, deeply susperstitious and easily sexually aroused by the sight of women. They had only the vaguest notion of what they were fighting for. But most were proud of their military achievements and expressed nostalgia for the prestige and power that a gun once gave them... The carers described their charges as violent and temporamental youths, who were often high on drugs when they were sent to the frontline and who still thought of themselves as real soldiers. "Children who have cracked under the strain of war are prone to sudden outbursts of violence," said Gregoire Tchobo, one of two carers who looks after the former child soldiers at night in their hostel... "They deny that they used to take drugs, but in fact they were drugged," Tchobo said. "They were either given injections or they were handed amphetimine tablets."

I've thought that those who recruited and exploited child soldiers were the lowest of the low. People truly vacant of any shred of humanity. This partly explains my particular hatred of Charles Taylor; the former Liberian dictator, warlord and indicted war criminal introduced the world, or at least West Africa, to this scourge. The use of child soldiers is unquestionably one of the worst, most destructive forms of terrorism in the world today.