Child soldiers

Paying the price for adult wars

According to some estimates, 300,000 child soldiers are currently fighting in 30 different conflicts around the world as guerrilla fighters or in support roles.
Kidnapped, terrorized, drugged and/or enticed through deception or even attracted by ideological propaganda 120,000 children bear arms in Africa alone. At times the boundary between voluntary and compulsory recruitment is blurred. In one form or another, it is said that at least one million children have played an active role in warfare over the last decade.
Armed rebel groups, would not give a second thought to forcibly recruiting an innocent 14 year old child and terrorizing her into becoming a sexual slave to a fighter. For the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of Uganda it is common place for the kidnapped girls to be distributed to rebel fighters.
The need for manpower and the development of weapons light enough to be handled by children work hand in hand in fueling the recruitment of children, some as young as 7 or 8 years old.
Children are cheap, expendable and easy to brainwash into the most ruthless, unquestioning tool of war. Some of the worst atrocities of conflict are committed by young child soldiers, who do not fully comprehend what they are doing. In Sierra Leone child soldiers hacked off limbs of other children.
They become so used to the culture of violence, to being in danger and putting others in danger that it becomes second nature.
Not only are children found on the front lines carrying weapons bigger than themselves but they also are used as spies, porters, sentries, messengers, servants as well as sexual slaves.
Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Palestine, Sierra Leone, Colombia, Angola, Uganda… a whole generation of children has grown up knowing only intractable conflict. When the conflicts are over, would the child soldier trade in his guns for a PC?
Seventeen years of civil war in the Sudan has drawn tens of thousands of children into the ranks of the southern Sudan rebel movement. Northern soldiers raid southern villages to enslave children.
In four years of civil war, the Democratic republic of Congo has expanded this cruel practice of recruiting child soldiers to neighboring countries.
The vanquished Taliban and the opposition forces who are now in power in Afghanistan recruited child soldiers from the religious schools in Pakistan and sent them directly to the front. In Palestine 16-year-old girls turn into walking bombs against Israeli settlers. In the inner city ghettos of South Africa and the US teenagers riddle rival homes with bullets from a moving car, in turf warfare.
In the last 10 years of children in war, 2 million have been killed, 6 million children have been injured, 22 million are refugees. More than a quarter of mine victims are children. For increasing number of children there is no time to grow up normally into an upstanding member of society.
The sad truth is that children neither start wars nor perpetrate them. That seems to be the job of the adult. Why are children made to pay the price for adult wars? Why is 15 years the minimum military recruitment age in International Law? Why should 17 year olds dies in senseless border wars?
Demobilization and reintegration of the child soldier to society, some argue, should be a part of all UN-brokered peace process. Organizations like UNICEF attempt to dissuade armed rebel groups from recruiting child soldiers; while the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed by 94 countries, bans all forms of recruitment of under 18 years by governments and armed group. Try enforcing this ban.
Hundreds of thousands of children have been physically and emotionally scarred by violence, their siblings, parents and friends have been killed, maimed or enslaved. Is international consensus an adequate tool to convince armed militant groups that the cost of using child soldiers is simply too high?
The implosion of African states like Somalia, the disbanding of murdering armies or escaping child armies from one African state to a neighboring African state only add fuel to the fire. Guns used in Somalia a few years ago could end up in Kenya, Ethiopia or the Sudan.
In Africa the number of assault rifles, grenades, pistols that have wholesale leaked out of military arsenals into the hands of children, have already become the reason for the deaths of masses of innocent civilians. Disputes that may have been settled with bows and arrows only a few years ago are now easily transformed into battles with sophisticated modern weapons. Compared to bows and arrows these are no less destructive than chemical weapons.
Child soldiering, just like terrorism, cannot be eradicated by wishful thinking, exterminated or fumigated. Will it have a permanent role in the developing world?
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