Child Exploitation.org
Child Soldiers

“I escaped one day during the day. I had left all my weapons behind. I was on guard duty
and I snuck away. They caught me after an hour. The militia recognized me, even though I
had changed into civilian clothes. I cried when they caught me. I begged them to let me go.
They chained me up with a metal chain. I couldn't move my arms. At the war council, I
wasn't allowed to talk. But luckily, they voted not to kill me. Instead, they made me dig
twenty meters of trenches, make twenty trips to get wood, and ordered me tied to a pole for
two weeks. I had to give a talk in front of everyone explaining why I had tried to desert, why
I had made this mistake.

My name is David”, says the teenage boy, shaking my hand politely. “My parents named
me after David in the Bible. Have you heard the story of how David slew Goliath?”
David is 16-years old and he believes he has already slain one Goliath in his life. “My first
Goliath was surviving the war against Mobutu”, says David. “I had to fight for 7 months and
I am still alive. But I was not alone in the battle – there were many other children who had
been recruited to fight just like me. The Goliath I face now is going to be more difficult to
beat, because I am facing him alone. But, I believe I will win if I concentrate and work hard
enough.”

Current Status of Child Soldiers

Many of the children who fought with the armed forces in and around Monrovia have been
released or they themselves have simply abandoned their groups. Some have returned to
their families; many more are languishing on the streets in the capital and other towns or in
internally displaced camps. Children who spoke with Human Rights Watch investigators are
waiting for demobilization programs to begin and eventual relocation to their families and
communities. Some have received limited humanitarian assistance in the camps, but the
majority are not currently assisted.

I’ve seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and so
many men and women burned alive . . . So many times I just cried inside my heart because
I didn’t dare cry out loud.
fourteen-year-old girl, abducted in January 1999 by the
Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group in Sierra Leone
In dozens of countries around the world, children have become direct participants in war.
Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, some 300,000 children are
serving as soldiers in current armed conflicts. These young combatants participate in all
aspects of contemporary warfare. They wield AK-47s and M-16s on the front lines of
combat, serve as human mine detectors, participate in suicide missions, carry supplies,
and act as spies, messengers or lookouts.
Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient soldiers.
Many are abducted or recruited by force, and often compelled to follow orders under threat
of death. Others join armed groups out of desperation. As society breaks down during
conflict, leaving children no access to school, driving them from their homes, or separating
them from family members, many children perceive armed groups as their best chance for
survival. Others seek escape from poverty or join military forces to avenge family members
who have been killed.


















This Is My Story

by Mohamed Kuteh, a student of the Sierra Leone Grammar SchoolHello Friends,
My name is Mohamed Kuteh a student of the Sierra Leone grammar school. This is my
story...
Everywhere in the world where there are conflicts and wars. The children tend to be used
as key factors in fighting. Countless numbers of these children are forced to join whilst
others are determined and willing to join because of lack of parental care.
Most of these children are under the ages of 18 and are used as tools by the politicians
and other elderly people in the society in order to fight for or against the government. The
situation of child soldiers is very rampant in the African continent. Countries like Sierra
Leone, Liberia, Rwanda and many others use children in armed conflicts. Most of these
children were separated from their parents. They are sometimes between the ages of 4-14
years old and trained up in the bush and become very dangerous like wild animals. These
children are given a chemical substance that s their daily food during battle, it makes these
children to be more and more dangerous like a bush fire in the harmattan.'
Worst of all, they are armed with heavy artilleries and other big machine weapons like A.K.
-47, RPG, and others. They use these weapons to launch a barrage of attacks on
highways, towns and villages, seas and every corner of the country. They also use
weapons like culasses and knives that they use to amputate and inject the stomachs of
pregnant women. They challenge themselves over the pregnant woman's stomach by
saying that the unborn baby is a boy or girl so by this, way they slit the stomach of the
woman with crude knives and uproot the unborn baby.
Some of these child soldiers also like burning houses, whilst dancing as the flames go up.
They like killing innocent civilians while others like to rape pregnant women and highly
educated women in the community. I am of course talking about (child soldiers who are
boys}. Some child soldiers, particular the rebel child soldier, will ask their peers who they
capture to kill their fathers or mothers. If anyone refuses to take their command, they will kill
that person., but if the captive kills his mother, he or she is asked to drink the blood. To
some bad extent, the body is prepared for them to eat as meat. They loot valuable
properties that make them quarrel most times over the vulture practice.

In 1998 it was estimated that up to 300,000 children were actively involved in armed conflict
in government armed forces, government militias and in a range of armed opposition
groups. This number is believed to have remained relatively constant although exact
figures are impossible to determine.
The problem is most critical in Africa, where up to 100,000 children, some as young as
nine, were estimated to be involved in armed conflict in mid 2004. Children are also used
as soldiers in various Asian countries and in parts of Latin America, Europe and the Middle
East.
The majority of the world's child soldiers are involved in a variety of armed political groups.
These include government-backed paramilitary groups, militias and self-defence units
operating in many conflict zones. Others include armed groups opposed to central
government rule, groups composed of ethnic religious and other minorities and clan-based
or factional groups fighting governments and each other to defend territory and resources.
Most child soldiers are aged between 14 and 18, While many enlist "voluntarily" research
shows that such adolescents see few alternatives to involvement in armed conflict. Some
enlist as a means of survival in war-torn regions after family, social and economic
structures collapse or after seeing family members tortured or killed by government forces
or armed groups. Others join up because of poverty and lack of work or educational
opportunities. Many girls have reported enlisting to escape domestic servitude, violence
and sexual abuse.




















I would like you to give a message. Please do your best to tell the world what is happening
to us, the children. So that other children don't have to pass through this violence."

The 15-year-old girl who ended an interview to Amnesty International with this plea was
forcibly abducted at night from her home by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), an armed
opposition movement fighting the Ugandan Government. She was made to kill a boy who
tried to escape. She saw another boy being hacked to death for not raising the alarm when
a friend ran away. She was beaten when she dropped a water container and ran for cover
under gunfire. She received 35 days of military training and was sent to fight the
government army.
The use of children as soldiers has been universally condemned as abhorrent and
unacceptable. Yet over the last ten years hundreds of thousands of children have fought
and died in conflicts around the world.
Children involved in armed conflict are frequently killed or injured during combat or while
carrying out other tasks. They are forced to engage in hazardous activities such as laying
mines or explosives, as well as using weapons. Child soldiers are usually forced to live
under harsh conditions with insufficient food and little or no access to healthcare.

Child Soldiers
by Brima Lakoh, a student of the Saint Edwards Secondary School Freetown, Sierra
LeoneThese are young boys and girls who are also in the army. These children have
decided or forced to join the army. In most parts of Africa, children are forced to join the
army when they find out that the big army men are not sincere. countries like Sierra Leone,
Liberia,Uganda and Somalia are some of the countries which are forcing children to hold
gun.
These commanders will call them one by one to give them drugs , which act on there
nervous system, cocain, tobacco, and alchohol. Those are the children that are chosen to
fight, burning houses, kill innocent civillians.
Also, when the war started in Sierra Leone rebels were taking children from there homes
and put them in the bush for training, some eight days training in the bush, will take them to
a rich place called 'Kono', where they mine diamonds. Then the children will love money
and not books, killing for money. They will forget education is better than silver and gold.













Africa: Day of the African Child: the unending plight of child soldiers

As Africa observes the Day of the African Child, as many as 120,000 children under 18
years old, some as young as eight, may be compelled to spend the day as child soldiers
across the continent, Amnesty International said today.

Despite the growing dynamic of peace in many conflict areas in Africa, the inadequate and
insufficient response of African governments and the international community to solve the
problem of child soldiering is encouraging the continued ruthless exploitation of Africa's
children by leaders of armed forces and armed political groups to further their own material
and political ends.

Whether in Burundi, Côte d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, Sierra
Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Somalia, children have been abducted in the streets or taken from
classrooms, refugee camps or camps for the internally displaced. Many have also been
taken from their homes at gunpoint, as their distraught parents looked on helplessly.
Others have reported being picked up while playing in their neighbourhood or walking
along the road. Some children are known to have voluntarily joined the army or armed
political groups after being separated from their families and facing poverty and the
collapse of basic social services such as educational and health centres.

Once recruited, forcibly or otherwise, some children are sent to camps for military training
and indoctrination. Here, they are mostly subjected to violent treatment. In some camps
children have died from deplorable conditions. After a few weeks of training, the children
are deployed to the front lines for combat. In DRC, some front line duties have included
serving as decoys, detectors of enemy positions, bodyguards for commandants, or sex
slaves. Most girl soldiers are sexually exploited or raped by their commanders or other
soldiers. Boys and girls are also often used as porters for ammunition, water and food, or
as cooks.

At an unofficial camp for internally displaced people in Monrovia, Liberia, several
adolescent girls recounted how they had been abducted from Ganta, Nimba County, by
former government militia in March 2003; they had all been raped, including E.B., aged 14
years. "I was coming from church on Sunday morning. They abducted five girls coming from
church. They took us to the front line. We had to cook and carry ammunition in the bush.
They treated us bad; if I didn’t go with them, they would kill me...They brought me to
Monrovia and left me here. I want to go to school. I want to go back to Nimba to my people."

Once on the front lines, children are repeatedly forced to commit abuses, including rape
and murder, against enemy soldiers and civilians. Jean-Noel R. joined the Burundian
armed forces aged 15 in 1998. In the five years that followed before he deserted with
serious mental health problems, he served in several areas of Burundi as well as Katanga,
DRC. "Everything in the army is done through fear. I didn’t want to do the things I did. All I
did was through fear. Congo was the worst. I saw too many things ... I am very tired."

The personal price paid by child soldiers is often high: brutalised and deeply traumatised
by their experiences, many continue to be haunted by the memories of the abuses they
witnessed or were forced to commit. For girl soldiers, beyond the brutality and trauma of
rape itself, sexual assault may result in serious physical injury and forced pregnancy, as
well as infection with HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases.




Most child soldiers are between 14 and 18 and are forced into involvement in
conflict or see no other option but to “volunteer”.
For example: since 1986, 20,000 children in northern Uganda have been abducted
by rebels and cruelly forced to fight in a civil war that has been raging for 18 years.
Research conducted by the Quaker UN Offices-Geneva, and Rädda Barnen
(Swedish Save the Children) which was published in 1998 indicated that up to
300,000 children under the age of 18 were participating in armed conflict worldwide.
Many children trafficked into armed conflict have had to participate in executions of
other children, soldiers or civilians. Other activities could include:
*  front line battle
*  human mine detectors
*  suicide missions
*  carrying supplies
*  spies, messengers or lookouts
*  domestic slaves for other soldiers
*  ongoing sexually exploitation  by other soldiers
In Ivory Coast, the Liberation Forces of the Great West, a pro-government militia
dominated by Liberians, recruited more than 9,000 people from refugee camps,
including children as young as eight.
Myanmar is unique in the Asia region, as the only country where Government armed
forces forcibly recruit and use children between the ages of 12 and 18.  
According to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in 2003, child soldier
issues remain part of the gross abuse of human rights in 18 different countries in
Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. There is an estimated:
- 70,000 children in the Myanmar army.
- 11,000 children in armed groups in Columbia.
- 100,000 children believed to be involved in hostilities in Africa.



Officers watch as the recruits in training march by.

Since 1993, Burundi has been gripped by a civil war between the Tutsi-led
government and rebel groups dominated -- and claiming to represent -- the Hutu
majority population. The government has herded the mostly Hutu population into
camps near the capital city of Bujumbura. Children from the camps join the army
and guerilla groups in order to escape the poverty, food shortages and boredom of
the camps. Desperation and hopelessness drives some despite -- such as
Ntirandekura, 16, pictured here -- to think that they have little choice but to join.
Others join in a relatively open manner, such as the boys pictured at Muramvya
Training Camp, a training camp for the army.




















Ntirandekura, 16, who is not a member of the Burundian army, poses with his
handmade gun in the village of Bandaga. The uniform he wears and the bullets he
shoots were given to him by the army.
"They have told me to come register. I think I will be a soldier in days to come . . . . I
can't be afraid of dying because even if they find me at home they can kill me."



















Consider this…
Rebels arrive in your village. Your parents and the parents of your neighbours are
beaten, speared and bludgeoned to death in front of you and your friends.
Everyone between the age of 8 and 16 is rounded up. Then, loaded on your backs
with loot taken from your own families you are force-marched across the country.
The abuses continue. You watch friends murdered for lagging behind and their
corpses left to rot where they fall or are thrown into the surrounding bushes.
The captives and their captors finally arrive in the rebel camps, where the former
undergo a strict regime of forced labour, deprivation and punishment. Girls are
raped or forced to become the "wives" of rebel commanders. Even those not yet in
their teens are not spared. Any unsuccessful attempts to escape are brutally
punished. Some succeed, but many never reach home.
This is a real story. More than 20,000 children have been abducted by the rebels in
northern Uganda since 1990. The kidnappings subsided in 2001, when hopes were
high that the conflict was slowly dying out, but after the Ugandan armed forces
launched a military offensive in early 2002
















by Mohamed Sidibay, age 10, Lucisse Preparatory School, Freetown, Sierra
LeoneMy name is Mohamed Sidibay presently reisding in Freetown , Sierra Leone.
Formally a child soldier during the ten year cevil war in my country Sierra Leone.
I was aged five (5) in 1991 in a diamond mining Town called Kono . I was preparing
to go to town with my mother and father on a Saturdy. I was inside our house
dressing when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels attacked . As I rushed
out hearing the gun-shots , my parents were no where to be found. As a lad I ran into
the crowd and was soon captured by these fierce fighters under the command of
Comanding Officer(C.O) Rambo ( a great rebelfighter).
I became a beast of burden carrying heavy bundles from one end of the country to
another . I had to tote a very heavy load from Kono ( an eastern province) to Makeni
( a northern province) which is ninty five (95) miles within two days on bare foot. This
our master C.O Rambo was killed as a result of conflict between him and his senior
called C.O Issa.
On our arrival in Makeni , we immediately started training to be childrebels ready to
fight government and foreign troops. In all this struggles I was not the only lad to
show out early mussles in the lions dens but we were captured in bunches from
different places.
We later finished training and were ready to tour Kailahun another distant Eastern
Town on foot.In this tour we took three days and Kailahun was our national fortress.
We based in this Eastern Town for three Months but was totally discarded by the
raid of the Nigerian fighter jet of the Economc Community Monitory Group(
ECOMOG) of West Africa. Our headquarter was forcefully bomberded and killed
many child and senior fighters.
We later struggled to gather and regain military might ; we ended up assemblying
but with less military strength. C.O Issa who we were under at that time appealed
and gathered enough human and sorphisticated weapon power ready for the big
fight in Freetown the capital city of Sierra Leone. Freetown was the strongest base
for the government and foreign forces. As a lad hailing amongst lions I was hard-up
and was ready for a die or live fight in Freetown.
We left in 1998 for Freetown and destroyed every obstacle on our way. After a four
(4) day walking and fighting we arrived at the frontier part of Freetown where we
met the Guinean ECOMOG troop. Unfortunately for us they over came us ,therefore
we made a tarctical retreat . A day after we re-attacked and finally infiltrated into the
city with full force and high man power. We entered Freetown on the unforgetable
January six(6) 1999. The city was turned up-side down with alienated weapons
shouting all about. We occupied the Eastern and Central Town( inclusive of State
House and Parliament) for two consecutive weeks and some days.
We were later pushed out by the Nigerian ECOMOG force and in our return burnt
down many houses and destroyed every life we met on our way. We kept destroying
until we reached Port Loko a major town in North .This was where peace talk was
said between the government and our force; peace was gained for a short while.
One Catholic priest called father Bethon went to receive all child fighters and be
brought to Freetown and other areas for re-union with our families.













The woman ran toward me, shouting and waving her arms, tears running down her
face. It was a freezing November morning, and I was in a refugee camp in Turanj, a
small, bombed-out town on the border between Bosnia and Croatia. A moment
later, the woman shouted out what sounded like some kind of curse and then
suddenly collapsed as if in a dead faint.

I could not understand what I had done to inspire such a reaction. A Polish United
Nations soldier, who understood Serbo-Croatian, stepped forward and explained
that the woman had not been raging at me but had been desperately seeking the
help of the only journalist to have shown her face in the camp in days.

The previous night, soldiers from the forces of Fikret Abdic had come to the camp
in search of new recruits. Abdic was a Bosnian businessman and warlord who,
though a Muslim, had broken with the government in Sarajevo and was fighting a
war within a war against it in northwest Bosnia. The fight was not going well, and he
needed all the fighters he could get.

The woman had already sacrificed for Abdic’s dubious cause. Both her husband
and her two elder sons had been killed during the fighting in the previous several
months. Now the fighters had taken her youngest boy. They had seized him and
thrown him in a van treacherously marked with red
crosses. He was only fourteen.

Occurrences like this took place all the time during the Bosnian War and are taking
place in conflicts that are still going on all over the world. While the employment of
children is anything but a recent phenomenon—for millennia, children have gone to
war as drummer boys, messengers, porters, and servants—the escalating number
of children bearing arms in contemporary conflicts is terrifying. Graca Machel,
author of the United Nations Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children,
has estimated that in 1995 and 1996 alone, 250,000 children were serving either in
government armies or in opposition forces. She has called the participation of child
soldiers in war “one of the most alarming trends in armed conflicts.”

The two Additional Protocols of 1977, applying to international and internal armed
conflicts respectively, impose on the parties to a conflict the obligation “to take all
feasible measures in order that children who have not attained the age of fifteen
years do not take a direct part in hostilities” and to “refrain from recruiting them into
their armed forces.” The 1998 Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court lists
as a war crime conscription or enlistment of children under the age of fifteen into a
State’s armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.

Human rights law also addresses the issue of children in armed conflict. The 1989
Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which has gained nearly universal
acceptance—the holdouts are Oman, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, and the
United States—is the primary instrument. The convention defines a child as a
person below the age of eighteen, but sets fifteen as a minimum age for going to
war. Some States want to set eighteen as the minimum age for combatants, but the
proposal has not received wide support, least of all from those countries affected by
internal conflicts of the sort most likely to see the use of child soldiers. In such
countries, particularly in Africa, typically half of the population is under the age of
fifteen
















This chilling image was captured by a photographer on the streets of the Liberian
capital of Monrovia in late June: A soldier — his eyes dull and his mouth wide open,
as if yelling fiercely — aims his AK-47 directly at the camera. On his back he wears
a knapsack in the form of a pink teddy bear. The gunman is perhaps 12 years old.
The faces of young and lethally armed combatants appear on all sides of Liberia’s
conflict, and peacekeepers will have to deal with them as they start their mission
Monday to quell the violence.

AS FIGHTING has intensified in Liberia’s civil war in recent weeks, aid workers in
Monrovia say that rebel groups and government forces have populated their ranks
with children. In one documented case of press-ganging in June, government forces
abducted children as young as 9 to serve in their ranks. Relief workers in Monrovia
say the two major rebel groups are also forcibly recruiting children.
“It is clear that in the past several weeks, all sides have scrambled to give weapons
to kids,” says Nils Kastberg, director of emergency programs at the United Nations
Children’s Fund, UNICEF. “We are talking about perhaps as many as 50 to 60
percent of the armed combatants being under 18.”
Some have been forced to fight, many recruited a second time after being
demobilized in previous chapters of Liberia’s civil war, and aid workers say some
have likely been lured by promises of food and water. Some 1.3 million people are
trapped in stadiums, compounds, pinned down by deadly and unpredictable
fighting, and unable to replenish dwindling supplies. In more than two weeks of
fighting between rebels and President Charles Taylor’s forces in the capital, well
over 1,000 people have been killed, the government says.      
PREPARING FOR ARMED KIDS
The first wave of peacekeepers — a Nigerian contingent deployed by ECOWAS,
the Economic Community of Western African States — will be on the ground
Monday, with logistical support from U.S. forces located off the coast of Liberia.
Meanwhile, in Ghana, political negotiations are under way in an effort to plan for
Liberia’s post-Taylor era.
These tasks are made even tougher by the large numbers of children and very
young adults involved in the conflict.        
In terms of peacekeeping, it’s definitely a concern,” says Jo Becker, child rights
advocacy director for U.S.-based Human Rights Watch. “We would advocate that
forces should take care to minimize any harm to children, but the unfortunate aspect
to international law is that once children pick up arms, they are legitimate targets.”
Most child soldiers have been press-ganged into service or joined voluntarily to
avenge the deaths of family members, or to seek protection among rebel or
government forces. They are used to find the way across mine fields, in dangerous
spying missions, and pushed to the front lines where they die in disproportionate
numbers. Girls are sometimes forced to fight, but more often are pressed into
service as “wives” to provide sex on demand.
“These children are victims,” says UNICEF’S Kastberg. “The greatest crime is
committed by the adults who allowed this to happen.”         


Images from Liberia's civil war        
But he notes, child fighters can be more volatile than adults, even if they are poorly
trained. Immersed in military culture and violence throughout formative their years,
child soldiers have been known to commit some of the most horrifying atrocities. In
this conflict, as in others where children are used in battle, they are doped up — on
amphetamines, marijuana and palm wine.
“There is nothing more terrifying that being stopped in the middle of the night at a
checkpoint manned by 10-year-olds with guns,” says Kastberg, who has worked in
international aid programs since for more than two decades. “Children haven’t had
a chance to develop a value system. … They have no parameters. They are totally
unpredictable.”  
Many observers have been pressing for a plan to deal with young combatants to be
put in place before peacekeepers’ arrival on the scene.
“An amnesty should be declared for all those under 18 and reception centers
immediately established,” says Princeton Lyman, a senior fellow and Africa expert
at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And there must be rules of engagement for
how to deal with child soldiers who threaten force.”
There are precedents for the situation. Nigerian peacekeepers working in Sierra
Leone, for instance, managed to isolate and disarm 5,000 to 7,000 child soldiers. In
the Sudan, some 15,000 have been demobilized.
However, there is no universally accepted way to deal with under-aged combatants.
Under international law, a child is considered no different than other combatants if
he or she is armed, but their treatment raises moral questions.
And some experts suggest that a protocol as well as training troops for encounters
with armed kids could save lives on all sides.         



Children on the front lines         

Where and why child soldiers are used         
There are about 300,000 child soldiers actively fighting at any given time around the
world.    
Child soldiers are used in at least 85 countries -- notably in Africa and Asia,
including: Liberia, Congo, Uganda, Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Myanmar,
Sri Lanka, Colombia and Paraguay.    
Myanmar is believed to have the largest number of child soldiers, in military and
insurgent armed groups.    
Access to light, easy-to-use lethal weapons is one reason children are now more
likely to be soldiers.    
The increase of civil conflicts since the end of the Cold War has also prompted
greater use of child soldiers, in part because factions tend to rely on large numbers
for success. Also, as these conflicts drag on, they deplete the pool of adult men, so
children are used to replace them.    







“If a soldier faces a child and ... it’s outside their realm of experience, there will be
shock and hesitation, and that can cost a soldier his or her life, and perhaps that of
a child,” says Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information.
She says studies suggest crowd dispersal techniques — such as firing into the air,
using helicopters and bullhorns — could be used to convince many younger fighters
to lay down arms and seek safe havens, which can be set up in advance.
UNICEF said it had been in Ghana negotiating with parties to the conflict to send
child welfare workers into Monrovia alongside peacekeepers, to help separate
child combatants and act as a deterrent for abuses against children by
peacekeeping forces. These forces are typically not held to account for abuses that
occur along the way.




Assuming successful intervention in Liberia, child soldiers still present a difficult
long-term challenge.
The country is in shambles, and about one-third of Liberia’s total population is under
18 — people who have spent all of their formative years amid war and violence.
Illiteracy runs about 80 percent. Unemployment is also about 80 percent.
“Ending the immediate hostilities will not end the destabilizing dimension of the
Liberian environment,” warns Bismarck Myrick, a former ambassador to Liberia
and now a lecturer in international affairs at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.
Liberia will need to rebuild almost every aspect of its infrastructure, and its
education system must be a top priority, he says.
Beyond a serious intervention to rebuild the education system, he says, the country
badly needs a corps of psychiatrists or counselors to help people recover from the
trauma of war and get reoriented.
“You disarm people, put them in school, you train them, give them vocational
training … allow them to be positive contributors to society. You don’t just disarm
them.”

IN LIBERIA, A LIFE OF COMBAT
That lesson has been learned the hard way in Liberia.
When Charles Taylor first won the presidency in 1997, after his forces finally ousted
the government of Samuel Doe after seven years of fighting, there was a brief
respite in the Liberian conflict and hope that Taylor would restore normalcy. During
that phase of the civil war, some 50,000 children were killed and many more were
injured, orphaned or abandoned, according to a State Department report. At the
time, some of the estimated 20,000 child soldiers were disarmed and demobilized.








But there was little done to reintegrate these kids into society. Nor was there much
in the way of society to reintegrate them into.
The economy and infrastructure did not rebound under Taylor, who quickly
established himself as just another corrupt and repressive dictator. It also emerged
that he was the primary force behind rebel forces in neighboring Sierra Leone —
and thousands of child soldiers there — who became infamous for hacking off the
hands of villagers. As a result, Taylor’s government came under international
sanctions, further deepening its economic hardship. Taylor is now charged with
crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone, including the specific charge of recruiting
children to fight.
Despite pressure from individual governments, UNICEF and some non-
governmental organizations have continued working in Liberia, and were able to
help a limited number of child soldiers. About 100 orphanages operated in and
around Monrovia but many children still lived on the streets.
In the absence of good alternatives and lacking other experience, many Liberian
child soldiers formed criminal gangs and mercenary groups who fought in regional
conflicts.
The rebellion against Taylor started in 1999 and has culminated in the standoff at
Monrovia. New conflict and extreme privation provide fertile ground for recruiting
new and former child soldiers.
“Kids are used to recruit other kids,” says Stohl of the Center for Defense
Information. “It’s a vicious, vicious cycle.”
























Throughout human history war has been a constant fact of life. Yet while we accept
its seeming inevitability we have struggled, fitfully and imperfectly, to manage and
limit its scope and effects. While not all rules are universally accepted or complied
with, during the past few centuries humanity has managed to agree on certain rules
of warfare. One of them is that unarmed civilians, generally regarded as innocents,
should not become targets of the hostile parties. And almost everyone would agree
that children, the most innocent of all, should be shielded from the effects of war.
Sadly, this "rule of innocents" has been increasingly ignored over the past several
decades as civilians are more affected by war and targeted by various factions. In
recent decades the proportion of war victims who are civilians has leapt
dramatically from 5 percent to over 90 percent. Worst of all, children are
increasingly being used as combatants. In most of the armed conflicts currently
raging in the world significant numbers of children under 18 years of age are active
combat participants. In many countries these child soldiers are under 15 - the
current minimum age for participation in hostilities and recruitment into armed
forces as stipulated in Article 38 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).
According to the most recent annual human rights report of the U.S. State
Department, "an estimated quarter of a million children, even as young as age 5,
have been conscripted to serve as soldiers in dozens of armed conflicts around the
world, some with armed insurgencies, such as the Khmer Rouge, the Shining Path
of Peru, and Palestinian groups in Lebanon, and some in regular armies, such as
those of Cambodia, Uganda, Angola, and Sudan." This phenomenon of child
soldiers is both new and horrifying. It violates the universal rule that children simply
have no part in warfare. It also shows the alarming state of morals around the world.
This was noted in an important study released by the United Nations last year. The
report "Impact of Armed Conflict on Children," noted, that "more and more of the
world is being sucked into a space in which children are slaughtered, raped, and
maimed; a space in which children are exploited as soldiers; a space in which
children are starved and exposed to extreme brutality. Such unregulated terror and
violence speak of deliberate victimization. There are few further depths to which
humanity can sink." Yet in spite of this and other reports the issue of child soldiers is
still largely an invisible one. A recent study by the Swedish group Rädda Barnen
(Save the Children) concludes this is because those who employ children as
soldiers deny their existence. No record is kept of their numbers or ages and ages
are falsified. Many are not part of the formally claimed strength of the forces or
groups to which they are attached but are unacknowledged members. They are
invisible because most spend their time in remote conflict zones away from both
public view and media scrutiny. They are invisible because they simply vanish: they
never return from the battlefield because they are killed or, having been injured, are
tragically abandoned. Lastly, those in their early teens are invisible because they
are less obviously children. And in a larger sense, perhaps this is the greatest
tragedy. Individually they all grow older. The very fact that the solider survives,
means the child disappears. The child in the soldier becomes invisible, locked
inside an "adult" soldier or an "adult" former soldier.

"The minors were obliged to cut the throats of those who had been declared
culpable by the "people's courts." Often they were made to eat the entrails - heart,
liver, kidneys - and to drink the blood of the rebels who were sentenced to death."--
Peruvian rebel group child soldier
Involving children as soldiers has been made easier by the proliferation of
inexpensive light weapons. As recently as a generation ago battlefield weapons
were still heavy and bulky, generally limiting children's participation to support roles.
But modern guns are so light that children can easily use them and so simple that
they can be stripped and reassembled by a child of 10. The unrestrained
international arms trade in conventional arms has made assault rifles such as the
AK-47 cheap and widely available. The poorest communities now have access to
weapons capable of transforming any local conflict into bloody slaughter. According
to the UN report (also known as the Gracel Macha report after the former First Lady
of Mozambique who prepared it) during the past 30 years governments and rebel
armies around the world have recruited tens of thousands of children. Most are
adolescents, but many of the child soldiers are 10 years of age or younger. While
the majority are boys, girls are also present as combatants.

Recruiting Child Soldiers




Child soldiers are usually recruited because not enough adults are available or
willing to become soldiers. They are recruited in many different ways. Some are
conscripted, others are press-ganged or kidnapped, and still others are forced to
join armed groups to defend their families. Although there are distinct recruitment
categories, in reality the areas of overlap are more striking than the differences.
Armed conflict itself contributes to the increasing number of child soldiers. War
disrupts normal economic and social conditions and causes educational
opportunities to shrink or disappear. Under these circumstances, recruits tend to
get younger and younger. Afghanistan where approximately 90 percent of children
are now thought to have no access to schooling, is a case in point. The proportion
of soldiers who are children is believed to have risen in recent years from roughly
30 to at least 45 per cent. Agencies such as UNICEF estimate that more than
200,000 children have been recruited into armies over the past decade. Some of
them as young as seven or eight are equipped with fully automatic assault
weapons. Governments in a few countries can legally conscript children under 18
but even where a legal minimum age is set, the law is not necessarily a safeguard
for those who are underage. Countries with weak administrative systems do not
conscript systematically from a register. Often those forcibly recruited or
volunteering are encouraged or forced to state that they are 18 in order to ensure
apparent conformity with national legislation or international norms. Many times
however, age is a matter of complete indifference to recruiters. A study on
Afghanistan noted, "Many children whose age has been mentioned clearly in their
national ID cards as less than 18 years were taken to [a] special military
commission where the military officers amended their age to meet the criteria of
military service. In this way they were sending children aged less than 14 years to
the armed forces." The very high proportion of children in the armed forces of El
Salvador during the 1980- 1992 civil war suggests this was a routine occurrence. Of
the approximately 60,000 personnel in the Salvadoran military ex-soldiers estimate
that about 80%, 48,000, were under 18 years of age. Quite often child "recruits" are
arbitrarily seized from the streets or even from schools and orphanages. Press
gang tactics were prevalent in Ethiopia in the 1980s when armed militias, police, or
army cadres would roam the streets picking up anyone they encountered. Children
from the poorer sectors of society are particularly vulnerable to this tactic. On the
other hand, in Burma, whole groups of children from 15 to 17 years old have been
surrounded in their schools and forcibly conscripted. Children are also recruited
from refugee camps and forced to join armed opposition groups in their country of
origin or the armed forces of the country providing asylum. In addition to being
forcibly recruited, children also voluntarily present themselves for service. It is
misleading, however, to consider this "voluntary." They may be driven by cultural,
social, political or--more often--economic pressures. Hunger and poverty often drive
parents to offer their children for service. In some cases, armies pay a minor wage
directly to the family. Children themselves may volunteer if they believe that this is
the only way to guarantee regular meals, clothing or medical attention. Some
parents encourage their daughters to become soldiers if their marriage prospects
are poor. Too often, parents may even see material advantages in having their
children's involved and are reluctant to forego the benefits that child combatants
obtain for their families. According to one study done in Sierra Leone, "many
mothers have remarked on the joy of seeing their ten-year-old dressed in a brand
new military attire carrying an AK-47. For some families the looted property that
child soldiers brought home further convinced them of the need to send more
children to the war front to augment scarce income." In fact, it is probable that the
vast majority of young soldiers are not forced or coerced into participating in
conflict. But they remain subject to many subtle manipulations and pressures that
are more difficult to eliminate than forced recruitment. Children's subjective
understanding of reality is influenced by their social milieu and developmental
processes. Other influences in their lives--their parents, families, peer groups,
schools, religious communities and other community institutions--might exert
pressures or send messages that lead children to participate in hostilities. Some
are persuaded to join by propaganda and religious fervor. For example, the
marching chant of a column of 15,000 Iranian children on their way to the front
during the war with Iraq was "Come on, come on, plunge on. Those who step on
mines will go to paradise." It is said those children were sent across minefields
ahead of more valuable, trained adult soldiers. Sometimes, the structural conditions
in a country induce children to become soldiers. Many children have personally
experienced or witnessed extremes of physical violence, including summary
executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest or detention,
sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home or property, and
massacres. Revenge can be a particularly strong motivation to "join up." Children
are especially valued in long drawn-out conflicts. Many current disputes have lasted
a generation or more--half of those underway in 1993 had been going for more than
a decade. Children who have grown up surrounded by violence see this as a
permanent way of life. Alone, orphaned, frightened, bored and frustrated, they will
often finally choose to fight. In the Philippines, which has suffered from insurgencies
for decades, many children become soldiers as soon as they enter their teens.
Adults too easily forget that the capacity of most children to judge what is in their
overall best interest is still largely unformed and uninformed. As such any "decision"
to join an armed group that appeals to such dubious criteria as a child's "right" of
free association or freedom of movement should be rejected as a mere pretense by
those who would use children for their own gain.


How Child Soldiers Are Used




In late 1996 children below 18 years of age were reportedly participating in 33
ongoing or recently ended conflicts, according to Rädda Barnen. In 26 of the
conflicts, almost 80%, the children involved were under 15, the current minimum age
limit stipulated in international law for participation in hostilities. The 33 countries in
which children are combatants are:
In Africa: Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Djibouti, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda.
In the Americas: Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru.
In Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, United Kingdom/Northern Ireland,
Turkey/Kurdistan, and Russian Federation/Chechnya.
In the Middle East/Persian Gulf: Israel/occupied territories, southern Lebanon, Iran,
and Iraq/Kurdistan.
In Asia: Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, India/Kashmir, Indonesia/East Timor,
Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, and Tajikistan. Countries where
children serve in government forces include Burma, Cambodia, Colombia,
Guatemala, Peru, and Sudan. Among opposition groups known to use children are
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the PKK in Turkey, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and the
LRA in Uganda. Although public awareness of child soldiers is relatively new, their
use in some countries is a longstanding practice. In Cambodia, for example, the
existence of child soldiers has been acknowledged for twenty-five years.
Nevertheless, the scale of the problem has been growing substantially in recent
years. Once recruited as soldiers, children generally receive much the same
treatment as adults, including often brutal induction ceremonies. The impact of the
regular use of physical and emotional abuse involving degradation and humiliation
of younger recruits to "indoctrinate" discipline and induce fear of superiors usually
results in low self-esteem, guilt feelings, and violent solutions to problems. Even
those who start out in "support" functions cannot escape exposure to the risks and
hardships most often associated with combat roles. Children often serve as porters,
carrying heavy loads up to 132 pounds. Children who are too weak to carry their
loads may be savagely beaten or even shot. Children are also used extensively as
messengers and lookouts. While these functions may seem less life-threatening
than combat, in fact the use of children in these important roles puts all children
under suspicion. In Latin America, government forces reportedly have deliberately
killed even the youngest children in peasant communities on the grounds that they,
too, could be "dangerous." While both boys and girls might start out in indirect
support functions, large numbers are rapidly forced into combat where their
inexperience and lack of training leave them particularly exposed. Young children
rarely appreciate the perils they face. Many studies report that when shelling starts
children get over-excited and forget to take cover. Some commanders deliberately
exploit such recklessness in children by giving them drugs or alcohol before using
them in human wave attacks. A former Burmese rebel child combatant recalls that
at age sixteen his job was to run into no man's land and "grab weapons, watches,
wallets and any ammunition from the dead soldiers, and bring it back to the
bunkers... This was a difficult job as you could see the enemy and they could easily
`pick you off' as you ran out and back again." The practice of treating children like
their adult counterparts can have severe physical effects. Poor and inadequate food
and medical care have more serious implications for children, whose bodies are
still growing and may be weakened by the exertions of military life. Being less adept
at looking after themselves or standing up for their rights children are more prone to
die from starvation and preventable diseases contracted in the unhygienic
conditions in which they live. If they cannot "keep up" they are routinely killed by their
leaders so that they cannot reveal any secrets. Children serving in government
armed forces are often no better off than their counterparts in opposition groups.
Children fall under the same military law as the adult soldiers. This means that
children can be beaten to death or shot for attempted escape and disobedience.
Case studies in Colombia, Ethiopia, Liberia, and Uganda report children being
shot for trying to escape recruitment. The Mozambican resistance group RENAMO
consistently and systematically practiced forced recruitment. A deserter, recruited
at age 10 explained that `RENAMO does not use many adults to fight because they
are not good fighters...kids have more stamina, are better at surviving in the bush,
do not complain and follow directions." Young, impressionable children can be
turned into the fiercest fighters through brutal indoctrination. A typical RENAMO
recruitment practice involved taking a boy soldier back to his village and forcing him
to kill someone known to him. The killing takes place in such a way that the
community knew that he had killed, thus effectively closing the door to the child ever
returning to his village. Such children may develop a dependency relationship with
their captors, eventually even coming to identify with their cause. Although the
majority of child soldiers are boys, armed groups also recruit girls, many of whom
perform the same functions as boys. Girls may also be forced to provide sexual
services. In Uganda, girls who are abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army are
"married off" to rebel leaders. If the man dies, the girl is put aside for ritual cleansing
and then married off to another rebel. Such abuse, which in some countries is
reported to be widespread, inevitably complicates the capacity of girl soldiers to
fully reintegrate with their communities as their families and acquaintances may be
unable socially to accept their mistreatment as "wives" or "comforters" of male
soldiers. With no alternatives, many girls turn to prostitution to survive. Not all
military commanders, however, share the viewpoint that children are moldable
troops with certain particular advantages. Some find they are slowed down due to
lack of stamina on the part of children. Others find that child soldiers are still children
and often misbehave, requiring precious leadership time to "parent" the offenders.
Treatment of captured child soldiers by government forces is often brutal. Many are
treated the same as captured adult soldiers: they are considered to be criminals or
terrorists and held in military prisons. Many captured child soldiers of both sexes
are subjected to abusive interrogation procedures, torture, isolation, rape, and
death threats. Furthermore, the active participation of some children exposes other
children to intense pressure, particularly in conflict zones, to join one or another
side. Even if they withstand the pressure and avoid recruitment, the suspicion that
they are involved makes them prime targets to attack, interrogation, or other
harassment. Whether extensive in time or not, the cumulative involvement of
children in the violence of war desensitizes them to suffering. In a number of cases,
children have been deliberately exposed to horrific scenes to "harden" their
psyches. Such experience makes children more likely to commit violent acts
themselves both during and after armed conflicts and may contribute to the difficulty
many countries experience in trying to integrate formerly hostile groups into a united
society. In many countries such as Afghanistan, Mozambique, Colombia and
Nicaragua, children have been forced to commit atrocities against their own
families or communities. In Sri Lanka reports indicate children as young as 10
years are used as assassins. One Peruvian woman, recruited into the rebel group,
"Shining Path," as an 11-year old, witnessed an execution her patrol carried out in a
village. "They beat all the people there, old and young, they killed them all, nearly 10
people...like dogs they killed them... I didn't kill anyone, but I saw them killing...the
children who were with them killed too... with weapons... they made us drink the
blood of people, we took blood from the dead into a bowl and they made us drink ..
then when they killed the people they made us eat their liver, their heart, which they
took out and sliced and fried.. And they made us little ones eat."


Consequences




Because "child soldier" is a physically transitory status--one can only be a child
soldier for a relatively few years--it has been very hard to focus attention on the
issue. However the consequences of being a child soldier are real, cumulative, and
very far from transitory. Child soldiers suffer many of the same physical and
psychological effects that war brings to noncombatant children. They are separated
from their parents and lose their homes. They are exposed to destructive violence,
witness death and atrocities, and are often permanently disabled when not killed.
Health care for wounded child soldiers is often problematic. In most countries where
child soldiers are found, health care is at best spotty. Sometimes, both government
forces and rebel groups leave the wounded on the battlefield. At times the only
medicine available is herbal. The most frequent injuries suffered by child soldiers
are loss of hearing, blindness, and loss of limbs. In Guatemala the principal causes
of death and injury of minors in the army were said to be the explosion of mines
placed by guerillas. This was due to the use of children as advance scouts and as
mine detectors. Other causes were grenade, rocket, and bomb explosions Physical
injury carries additional emotional, psychological, economic, and social
disadvantages. Loss of sight or hearing are severe obstacles to educational or
social development. Loss of limbs may require repeated amputations for those still
growing since the bone of the amputated limb grows more than the surrounding
tissue. They will also require new prostheses frequently. In addition to the trauma,
treatment costs may be too high or the necessary facilities may be unavailable. In
Mozambique demobilized child soldiers complain of health problems related to
bullets and shrapnel still lodged in their bodies. Many families do not have the
resources to pay for operations to remove these objects. In societies with high
levels of unemployment, the additional disadvantages from wounds may be too
hard to overcome. Perhaps the most severe long-term consequences of children
serving as soldiers may be on their moral development. When the fighting ends and
children return to society, it is very difficult to place them in the more sedate
surroundings of schools or families. Their moral system is dominated by fear of
violence from whomever is superior in the hierarchy. Child soldiers find it difficult to
disengage from the idea that violence is a legitimate means of achieving one's
aims, and find the transition to a non-violent lifestyle difficult. How can they learn
from unarmed adults? How can they work? How can they marry and rear children?
How can they be expected to be a functioning member of a civil society when their
entire formative experience is that society is organized around fear of violence?

I was chosen by a bandit chief named Johanes to be his servant. I washed and
ironed his clothes and did whatever was necessary. The chief liked my work and
made me his bodyguard. He gave me a pistol and a bayonet and told me to guard
his belongings while he was away on raids. I also watched his three women to
make sure they did not get approached by other bandits or go with them. The chiefs
told us to look at people when they are beaten and to never act like we don't like it.
The told us we could not cry or be sad when people were killed... I had been at the
base for five months when Johanes made me kill a man...I took my bayonet and
stabbed him in the stomach...They told me I was now one of them.
Under the Convention of the Rights of the Child (see below) every child is entitled to
receive such "protection and care as is necessary for his or her well-being." States
are obliged to "ensure to the maximum extent possible the survival and
development of the child," to protect children from all forms of mental violence or
abuse, and to strive to ensure that victims of armed conflict have access to
rehabilitative care. But, given the numerous wars around the world and the lack of
resources to ameliorate their effects in the countries where they take place, these
obligations are honored more in the breach than in actual day-to-day events. The
proof of this is that fact that no peace treaty to date has formally recognized the
existence of child combatants. As a result, their special needs are rarely if ever
taken into account in demobilization programs. But if simple human decency does
not compel governments to care for children, pragmatic considerations of self-
interest should. If children who were soldiers are not reintegrated into a post-conflict
society, they may well contribute to future conflicts. In this sense protection of
children is not just a humanitarian issue but an international security one as well. If
nothing else, war avoidance should impel us to help former child combatants make
the adjustment back to civilian life. To that end governments must take or assist with
appropriate measures that promote children's physical and psychological recovery
and social reintegration. Ms. Machel, who conducted the UN study on "Impact of
Armed Conflict on Children," recommended that all phases of emergency and
reconstruction assistance programs include psycho-social considerations.
Programs should support healing processes and reestablish a sense of normalcy
through daily routines of family and community life; through fostering structured
activities such as school, play, and sports; and mobilize the community care
network around children.













CRAMMED onto the back seat of the jeep, the boys wave out of the window,
grinning broadly. They look for all the world like friends leaving on a day out, were it
not for the jumble of AK47s and rocket launchers resting on their laps. None of them
look older than about 13. Close by, another boy of 11 lounges bored on a wicker
chair, supporting with one hand a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher. These
boys are just a small handful of the estimated 15,000 child soldiers in Liberia who
have been drugged, bribed and bullied into fighting on the front line. They are with
the Lurd rebel forces and until the ceasefire of mid-August would have been fighting
against children of their own age in the government militias. Children make up an
estimated 70 per cent of all three of the militias. This month will see the start of
demobilisation, a real chance to end 14 years of civil war. In the Liberian capital,
Monrovia, Don Bosco Homes runs three night shelters. They expect the steady
trickle of child soldiers already turning up on their doorstep to swell to a flood of
several thousand. Once they have left the militias that kept them fed with looted
bounty, former child soldiers are left destitute. Since a third of all Liberians have
been forced from their homes in the fighting, many of the children have no idea how
to start looking for their families. They arrive at the shelters hungry, scared and often
virtually naked. I talked to one 14-year-old, Prince Jakes, who walked for four days
to escape the front line where he had been fighting for a year and two months. He
joined up after an argument with his stepmother. When the government press gangs
approached him with the promise of $20 and a bag of rice, he accepted their offer.
“I took one day to learn how to use a gun and then they sent me to the front line”,
said Prince, who had arrived at the shelter two days earlier, bedraggled and
terrified. “The first time I went to the front line, I saw one of my friends shot dead in
front of me. I was frightened and I started being reluctant to fight. But I couldn’t
escape because the small boys are placed at the front and the generals are behind
watching. So if you run away they would either fire at your legs or kill you
immediately.” Later, he fell into the hands of the Lurd rebels, and switched
allegiance to save his life. “Three of us were captured. One was killed by the rebels
instantly – they cut his stomach open and took out his intestines. Then the other one,
they cut his arms off. I told them, ‘I am a small boy’, and I was begging and crying for
them not to kill me. So they told me to come and fight with them.” Like most child
soldiers, Prince was fed a cocktail of drugs and alcohol by his commanders, which
he says made him look at human bodies “as if they were chickens”. He has no idea
how many people he has shot in battle, as the typical style of fighting in Liberia is to
spray bullets indiscriminately, paying little heed to where they land. But the boy
whose voice has yet to break knows that he has killed. Shortly after his capture by
Lurd forces, he proved his new-found loyalty by executing a government soldier at
point-blank range. Just in case he needed any persuasion, his commander held a
gun to his head. I spoke also to a nine-year-old, James, who executed two men
while fighting for government forces. Dressed in a red T-shirt that came down to his
knees and was the only shirt he had, he explained that his commander had asked
for volunteers to carry out the killing of a Lurd rebel. “I put up my hand. You could see
by looking at everyone else that they wanted to do it, that’s why I wanted to do it.
“After that first time, we found a man who was relaxing by a banana tree. We
captured him and took him to the base.” There they tied his elbows together behind
his back, making it difficult for him to breathe. “Then the commander asked who
wanted to finish him off. So they left him with me and I pushed him into the bush and
fired at him in the chest. I fired three rounds and he didn’t get up.” The child soldiers
quickly learnt that brutality was praised and rewarded by their commanders. “I can’t
remember the last time that anyone kissed me or embraced me”, admitted James.
“But my commander used to praise me when I had fought well and call me a big
man.” Liberia has been at this crossroads before. To end the endemic strife, the
international community pushed hastily for elections in 1997. The now exiled
President, Charles Taylor, came to power before the demobilisation and
disarmament process was complete. It is estimated that only 60 per cent of the
child soldiers fighting at that time were successfully disbanded. So when, after only
two years of peace, the cycle of violence started up again, children who knew of no
other life were again on the front line. Unicef estimates that one in ten Liberian
children have been in the militias at some point. For many of the child soldiers the
return to civilian life can be less than appealing. They have become used to the
power that comes from holding a gun and just helping themselves to whatever they
want. The prospect of returning to school and the daily struggle of family life is
frightening. Girls forced to become the “wives” of commanders often have children
from repeated rape and have no means of supporting them outside the militias.
One childcare worker at Don Bosco Homes, Kofi Ireland, is well aware of the
challenge ahead. After breaks in fighting on previous occasions, Don Bosco
restarted the task of rehabilitating soldiers only for war to put an end to the work.
This time, though, he believes that the peace will last. “The first aim of the
rehabilitation programme is to give these children hope again”, he said. “Most of
them have no expectation of being able to rebuild their lives. Unless we keep the
children occupied, they fast sink into depression and become withdrawn, thinking
about their past experiences.” Alongside intensive counselling and basic school
work, football plays a vital part by both lifting depression and teaching the former
combatants how to work in a team outside of a military context. Older children are
taught a skill by craftsmen within the community, giving them an alternative to
rejoining the militia. All being well, the aim is to reunite the children with their
families within three months. But it can be extremely difficult to trace parents, and
persuading communities to take back the child soldiers often proves even tougher.
People have often seen the children commit atrocities and fear what they have
become. To help in this work, the Catholic aid agency Cafod has brought in four
experts from their partner in Sierra Leone, Caritas Makeni, with experience of
successfully reuniting thousands of former child soldiers who fought in the Sierra
Leone civil war. Abu Conteh who runs the Caritas Makeni reintegration programme
explained their approach to me: “We have to tell communities that the child is a
community child. In Sierra Leone as in Liberia, we traditionally believe that a child
belongs to the community not to individuals. The community should come together
and bring up a child which has gone astray.” The process of bringing a child back
often involves a long period of mediation and negotiation between the child, his
family and the community leaders. But the record of Caritas Makeni is astounding –
only three children have not been reunited with their parents and in all three cases
they were too young to remember where they had come from. They have instead
been placed with foster families. When all parties have agreed to the child returning,
a traditional cleansing rite is often performed. “In some ceremonies the child is
covered with black clay and then taken by the priest to the stream to wash him of
what he has done”, explained Caritas Makeni. “One woman washed her child’s feet,
then drank some of the water. The rest she poured over his head. Then she chewed
some cola nuts and gave some to her son. Both the cola nut and water symbolise
bringing back peace and life to the child.” Now that he is safe, Prince Jakes is
eager to start that journey back to his family. “I like being at Don Bosco Homes
because it will help me change my life and I want to be able to learn. I want to
become a pastor in the Church, because I want to tell my friends that holding a gun
is not good and to be a real role model . “I want Don Bosco to help me to go back to
my home and help me say sorry for what I have done.”


Britain is to end its centuries-old policy of sending boy soldiers into battle after
deciding to ratify a UN protocol aimed at preventing the use of children in warfare.
But it will continue to recruit 15-year-olds even though the protocol is specifically
aimed at stopping armies from recruiting anyone under 18. At present, more than a
third of recruits to the Armed Forces are below this age.
The deployment of 17-year-old soldiers during the Gulf war and the Kosovo conflict
led Save the Children and other campaign groups to compare Ministry of Defence
policy to that of Third World countries.
An investigation is continuing after two soldiers of 17 who were equipped with live
ammunition died in shooting incidents at a barracks in Surrey.
In anticipation of the protocol's ratification, the Army has amended its rules to
ensure that no one under 18 can be deployed on military operations abroad where
there is a possibility of hostilities, said an MoD spokesman.
"We are putting in place policies that will enable us to comply with the new policy
once the protocol has been ratified," he said. An unspecified number of 45
Commando, which is joining US-led attacks on al-Qa'eda and Taliban forces in
Afghanistan, have been withdrawn because they are under 18.
The optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child will be laid
before Parliament after Easter, a spokesman said. However, one of its key aims, to
raise the age of recruitment above the age of 18 goes directly against Army policy.
The Army believes that recruiting soldiers young ensures that they stay in the
service longer. This eases the chronic retention problems that have left it unable to
get its numbers anywhere near the 108,500 personnel laid down by the 1998
Strategic Defence Review.
The Army is still struggling to raise regular strength above 100,000 and has been
forced to reduce manning levels to just 107,000. Recruiting teenagers is seen as
the answer to these problems.
Technically, the Army can recruit children as young as 15 years and nine months.
They do not begin training until they are 16 and only then if they are joining the Army
Foundation College at Harrogate, North Yorks.
All three services recruited 16-year-olds for similar "boy service" training until the
early 1990s when the Major government stopped the practice. The MoD believes
that decision led to today's recruitment problems.
Last year's Defence Training Review recommended that a second college be built
and that training should cover all three services. Even servicemen joining the "man's
service" need to be only 17, provoking anger among campaign groups including
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Save the Children.
A report last year by the International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers
singled out Britain as one of the worst offenders among 178 countries, most of them
in the Third World. The MoD said it unreservedly condemned the use of children in
armed conflict.
But the recruitment of 16- to 18-year-olds with the consent of their parents was
fundamentally different to "the abusive, compulsory, or coercive involvement of
children as members of militia or para-military forces".
No British servicemen or women under 18 would now be deployed on land
operations outside the UK, although they might participate in purely humanitarian
missions where no hostile forces are involved.
No one under 18 would be allowed to carry out operational patrols in Northern
Ireland, although they might be sent there in other roles. A spokesman for Amnesty
International said: "The UK holds the lowest minimum age for recruiting within
Europe and is still seeking to broaden its recruitment of children.
"It has to decide what is the best way to defend Britain, with children or with adults."



By Ilana Ozernoy, Special Correspondent
Originally published in Newsday, June 3, 2002
GULU, Uganda — Kristine Abalo never wanted to kill anyone. As a 12-year-old girl
in this impoverished, dry region of northern Uganda, she had no ambition to
become a guerrilla fighter, to loot nearby villages or to haul 90-pound cases of
bullets to the battlefront.
But Kristine never had a choice. She is one of an estimated 10,000 children
kidnapped over the past 16 years by the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla group
that mixes Christian fundamentalist and animist spiritual teachings with a penchant
for casually killing or mutilating those who displease its commanders.
Traumatized and mistrustful, haunted by memories of the killings she saw—and
those she committed—Kristine, now 18, still counts herself as lucky among the
resistance army's victims, simply for having escaped alive.
The tale of her enslavement, combined with an escalation of this obscure but brutal
war since March, offers ominous signs of new disaster for the thousands of children
still in the rebels' grip. As the Ugandan army drives into southern Sudan to wipe out
the resistance army's main camps, human rights and relief workers say, many of the
abducted children are likely to die in battle. UNICEF, the United Nations Children's
Fund, says about 5,106 of at least 10,000 children abducted by the resistance army
since 1987 remain unaccounted for.
While Uganda says it aims to free "thousands of children abducted by the LRA …
we have yet to see any evidence that the children are being rescued," said Carol
Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. Stories of intense fighting "raise deep
concerns that innocent children and women—the primary victims of [LRA] …
brutality—are themselves being caught in the crossfire," Bellamy said in a
statement in April.
After grisly coups and wars under Milton Obote and Idi Amin from 1966 to 1985,
Uganda has stabilized largely under the tight, 16-year grip of President Yoweri
Museveni. Its economic growth of 6 percent a year helped prompt President Bill
Clinton to praise the country as a model during his 1998 tour of Africa.
But such hopefulness doesn't apply to the war-ravaged north. Museveni concedes
that poverty has only deepened there. Gulu made headlines in 2000 for an outbreak
of the deadly Ebola virus, but most of the region's miseries go little noted abroad.
East of Gulu, Ugandan troops fight an episodic war against ethnic Karamojong
herdsmen, whom they accuse of banditry. Here in the lands of the ethnic Acholi, the
resistance army's random savagery has killed thousands and driven about half of
the population, or a half-million people, from their villages into camps where they
live uneasily under the soldiers' guard, surviving on aid agencies' handouts.
Bands of the Lord's Resistance Army raid villages to kidnap children, loot goods
and enforce draconian "rules," with frequently arbitrary brutality. Rebels have killed
people for raising sheep or other "unclean" animals and amputated the feet of those
caught riding bicycles, human rights groups say. In describing one such account,
South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper said bike riders were targeted on the
grounds that they would otherwise escape and warn the Ugandan army when the
rebels were around.
After giving haven to the LRA since the mid-1990s, Sudan agreed in March to let
Ugandan troops enter its territory for what was to be a two-week mop-up. But the
fighting has been tougher than Uganda's army expected, and its spokesman said
last month the assault would last through June.
Catholic church officials in southern Sudan said the resistance army had torched
villages and killed 470 civilians in one district in the first weeks of the offensive, and
Sudan's government said about 4,000 people had been uprooted.
Accounts of the group's child captives, brought back by escapees like Kristine
Abalo, suggest that the children are perhaps more likely to be killed in battle than
rescued. The children are brainwashed to fight to the death and may be tough to
distinguish from their captors, even if the Ugandan army takes the care to do so.
The resistance army hopes to overthrow Museveni and install its own government
based on the Ten Commandments.
In her six years of captivity, Kristine said, the rebels' leader—a self-styled prophet
named Joseph Kony who claims to be in contact with the Holy Spirit—often lectured
the children that his men would kill them if they tried to escape, or that Ugandan
troops would do so if they returned home.
Kony reportedly keeps authority through a combination of brute force and occult
mysticism. "I believe he is possessed by evil spirits," Kristine said. "He is a very
bad man and was the cause of my suffering."
Kristine was kidnapped as she walked home from a local market one evening. A
group of rebels seized her and six other children on the road, tied their hands and
shoved them into the back of a truck. In an isolated field several miles away, the
men threatened the children and beat them with machetes, killing two, Kristine said.
For a year, the guerrillas forced the children to move with them and to help loot
villages in northern Uganda. "My job was to carry the booty … like clothes and grain.
In Sudan, I had to carry 90-pound cases of bullets to the front lines," she said.
"One month after I was taken from my village, I was forced to have sex with one of
the rebels. I was trained to shoot," Kristine said. "The rebels forced me to kill many
people. We were told that if we didn't fight, we would be killed by the rebels."
In the camp in Sudan, the rebels kept their new abductees isolated from one
another and busy with hard labor. Kristine said she was given as a wife to a rebel
who beat her for insubordination and forced her to clean, wash his clothes and cook
when she was not out killing the rebels' enemies.
After Kristine gave birth to twins, she plotted an escape. One night, when the rebels
had taken most new captives out for an offensive, she fled with her babies and six
other children. Eventually, they reached Sudanese authorities who helped find an
aid agency to fly them home.
The children who make it back to Uganda "have flashbacks, nightmares,
hallucinations, they lose the ability to concentrate. There is also a physical impact.
Some children come back with missing limbs. Some come back HIV-positive," said
Julius Tiboa, head of Gulu Save the Children Organization, or GUSCO, a local
group that provides medical help and counseling to the returnees.
And they face ostracism. People often blame the children for the violence they
committed. If a local family finds a son "has brought home a girl who was in
captivity, they are abusive and unwelcoming," said Sara Akoko, a social worker for
the organization. "When I asked other child mothers if they had any hope for future
children, most of them said they have no hope, and they have no desire."
Akoko—whose group has worked with 2,700 returned children—has been
monitoring Kristine's return and says her chances of leading a normal life are grim.
Kristine spent two months in the group's rehabilitation program, getting counseling
and medical attention. While there, she tried to give away her twin sons, who were a
painful reminder of her captivity. She was depressed and had nightmares.
Now, living again with her family, she spends her days willingly caring for her
malnourished 2-year-olds, who still tug at her breasts in hopes of getting milk.
Kristine wants to believe she is safe here, in the shade of palm trees that surround
her family's clay huts. But she seldom leaves the compound and remains ashamed
and angry at what happened to her. She says she will never marry, never trust men.

















The United Nations has made tremendous progress in raising awareness about
issues affecting children of war, but there's a gap between what is written on paper
and what happens in the field, one expert believes. "The reality is that when you're
talking about international policy, and you're talking about the UN Security Council
and other big international bodies, the wheels of change are too slow for many of
these kids," said Julia Freedson, coordinator of the Watchlist on Children and
Armed Conflict, a network of nongovernmental organizations.
"By the time we're done talking about what we should be doing to protect the kids,
many of them have already lost their lives or suffered in other horrible ways."
Take, for example, the issue of landmines. More than 130 countries have ratified a
treaty banning the use of mines. Jo Becker of the Children's Rights Division of
Human Rights Watch says landmines can have a particularly devastating effect on
children.
"When children step on landmines, they're much more likely to be killed than adults
because of their smaller body size and their vulnerability to the kinds of injuries that
landmines cause," she said.
Safety Training for Children

Since 1997, when the treaty took effect, the use of landmines has declined around
the world, Becker said. But many countries, including the United States, have not
signed the treaty, arguing that they mark minefields and therefore their explosives
aren't a danger to civilians. But that's not how it looks to the victims.
In Macedonia, once part of Yugoslavia, thousands of grade school children have
seen a play in which animal characters discover an unexploded bomb. Many of the
children live in Tetovo, a site of heavy fighting between ethnic Albanians and
Macedonians during the Balkans conflict. In this region, landmines planted by both
sides—as well as unexploded cluster bombs dropped by Holland, Britain, and the
United States—still pose grave dangers to civilians.
Cluster bombs are made up of many small bomblets contained within one large
delivery system. Experts estimate that between 7 and 11 percent of the bomblets
do not explode on impact. Cluster bombs are not covered by the landmine treaty,
but do pose a danger to children.
Education efforts like the play put on by the International Committee of the Red
Cross are helping children understand the importance of not picking them up.
"The message from the play is not to touch unknown objects," said Emma, one of
the students who watched the play. "Tell our parents if there is danger. And don't
even get close to unknown objects."


US Opposes International Treaties

While many countries have not signed the landmine treaty, every country in the
United Nations has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child except
Somalia and the United States. The treaty guarantees children's rights to education,
housing, and a decent standard of living. The US Senate has refused to ratify the
treaty because it bans the death penalty for anyone under 18 and allegedly takes
rights away from parents. Ambassador Michael Southwick, a US State Department
deputy secretary, says the convention interferes with how countries treat children
within their own borders.
"Some countries try to give it the status of a secular religion and say this is the only
standard in the world; to me this is an absolutely silly position," Southwick said.
"How people treat children in the world is a product of culture, it's a product of
religious traditions, and so forth, and to say that one treaty negotiated at one
particular time is the be-all and end-all on children is a little bit absurd."
But human rights activist Jo Becker says failure to ratify the convention damages
US credibility around the world.
"When I travel outside of the United States I'm repeatedly asked by both
government officials as well as people in civil society why the US, which purports to
be a champion for children, has not ratified the most basic convention designed to
protect them."
The United States has also angered human rights groups by opposing the
International Criminal Court, which, among other duties, will prosecute individuals
committing war crimes against children




Refugees and Displaced Persons

Who
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or
her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political
opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to
return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife
or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the
world in 2001 - people who had crossed an international border to seek safety - and
at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been uprooted within
their own countries.
What
Enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the
right "to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." This
principle recognizes that victims of human rights abuse must be able to leave their
country freely and to seek refuge elsewhere. Governments frequently see refugees
as a threat or a burden, refusing to respect this core principle of human rights and
refugee protection.
Where
The global refugee crisis affects every continent and almost every country. In 2001,
78 percent of all refugees came from 10 areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma,
Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritrea, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and
Sudan. Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and
make up more than one fourth of all refugees. Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees,
followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).
When
Throughout history, people have fled their homes to escape persecution. In the
aftermath of World War II, the international community included the right to asylum in
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the Office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to protect and
assist refugees, and, in 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating
to the Status of Refugees, a legally binding treaty that, by February 2002, had been
ratified by 140 countries.
Why
In the past 50 years, states have largely regressed in their commitment to protect
refugees, with the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America and
Australia - which first established the international refugee protection system -
adopting particularly hostile and restrictive policies. Governments have subjected
refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and
closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee
protection, nonrefoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to
countries where they face persecution. Since September 11, many countries have
pushed through emergency anti-terrorism legislation that curtails the rights of
refugees.
How
Human Rights Watch believes the right to asylum is a matter of life and death and
cannot be compromised. In our work to stop human rights abuses in countries
around the world, we seek to address the root causes that force people to flee. We
also advocate for greater protection for refugees and IDPs and for an end to the
abuses they suffer when they reach supposed safety. Human Rights Watch calls on
the United Nations and on governments everywhere to uphold their obligations to
protect refugees and to respect their rights - regardless of where they are from or
where they seek refuge.












I’ve seen people get their hands cut off, a ten-year-old girl raped and then die, and
so many men and women burned alive... So many times I just cried inside my heart
because I didn’t dare cry out loud.
- fourteen-year-old girl, abducted in January 1999 by the Revolutionary United Front,
a rebel group in Sierra Leone


In dozens of countries around the world, children have become direct participants in
war. Denied a childhood and often subjected to horrific violence, some 300,000
children are serving as soldiers in current armed conflicts. These young combatants
participate in all aspects of contemporary warfare. They wield AK-47s and M-16s
on the front lines of combat, serve as human mine detectors, participate in suicide
missions, carry supplies, and act as spies, messengers or lookouts.

Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient
soldiers. Many are abducted or recruited by force, and often compelled to follow
orders under threat of death. Others join armed groups out of desperation. As
society breaks down during conflict, leaving children no access to school, driving
them from their homes, or separating them from family members, many children
perceive armed groups as their best chance for survival. Others seek escape from
poverty or join military forces to avenge family members who have been killed.

Child soldiers are being used in more than thirty countries around the world. Human
Rights Watch has interviewed child soldiers from countries including Angola,
Colombia, Lebanon, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda. In Sierra Leone,
thousands of children abducted by rebel forces witnessed and participated in
horrible atrocities against civilians, including beheadings, amputations, rape, and
burning people alive. Children forced to take part in atrocities were often given
drugs to overcome their fear or reluctance to fight.

In Colombia, tens of thousands of children have been used as soldiers by all sides
to the country’s ongoing bloody conflict. Government-backed paramilitaries recruit
children as young as eight, while guerrilla forces use children to collect intelligence,
make and deploy mines, and serve as advance troops in ambush attacks.

In southern Lebanon, boys as young as twelve years of age have been subject to
forced conscription by the South Lebanon Army (SLA), an Israeli auxiliary militia.
When men and boys refuse to serve, flee the region to avoid conscription, or desert
the SLA forces, their entire families may be expelled from the occupied zone.

Girls are also used as soldiers in many parts of the world. In addition to combat
duties, girls are subject to sexual abuse and may be taken as “wives” by rebel
leaders in Angola, Sierra Leone and Uganda. In Northern Uganda, Human Rights
Watch interviewed girls who had been impregnated by rebel commanders, and then
forced to strap their babies on their backs and take up arms against Ugandan
security forces.

Because of their immaturity and lack of experience, child soldiers suffer higher
casualties than their adult counterparts. Even after the conflict is over, they may be
left physically disabled or psychologically traumatized. Frequently denied an
education or the opportunity to learn civilian job skills, many find it difficult to re-join
peaceful society. Schooled only in war, former child soldier are often drawn into
crime or become easy prey for future recruitment.



The army was a nightmare. We suffered greatly from the cruel treatment we
received. We were constantly beaten, mostly for no reason at all, just to keep us in a
state of terror. I still have a scar on my lip and sharp pains in my stomach from being
brutally kicked by the older soldiers. The food was scarce, and they made us walk
with heavy loads, much too heavy for our small and malnourished bodies. They
forced me to learn how to fight the enemy, in a war that I didn't understand why was
being fought."

- Emilio, recruited by the Guatemalan army at age 14(2)
"One boy tried to escape [from the rebels], but he was caught... His hands were
tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I
knew this boy from before.We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and
they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The
boy was asking me, "Why are you doing this?" I said I had no choice. After we killed
him, they made us smear his blood on our arms... They said we had to do this so
we would not fear death and so we would not try to escape. . . I still dream about the
boy from my village who I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me and
saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying." - Susan, 16, abducted by the Lord's
Resistance Army in Uganda(1)


"They gave me pills that made me crazy. When the craziness got in my head, I beat
people on their heads and hurt them until they bled. When the craziness got out of
my head I felt guilty. If I remembered the person I went to them and apologized. If
they did not accept my apology, I felt bad."


- a 13-year old former child soldier from Liberia(3)


"I was in the front lines the whole time I was with the [opposition force]. I used to be
assigned to plant mines in areas the enemy passed through. They used us for
reconnaissance and other things like that because if you're a child the enemy
doesn't notice you much; nor do the villagers."


- former child soldier from Burma/Myanmar(4)


"They beat all the people there, old and young, they killed them all, nearly 10
people... like dogs they killed them... I didn't kill anyone, but I saw them killing... the
children who were with them killed too... with weapons... they made us drink the
blood of people, we took blood from the dead into a bowl and they made us drink...
then when they killed the people they made us eat their liver, their heart, which they
took out and sliced and fried... And they made us little one eat."


- Peruvian woman, recruited by the Shining Path at age 11
Most people have no idea how large the problem truly is.