Children and the world

Child Soldiers

Introduction:  According to current estimates, more than 500,000 children under the age of 18 are forced into military service in around 90 countries worldwide.  Of those half a million, at least 300,000 are believe to be in actual combat.  Widely perceived as cheap and expendable, child soldiers tend to receive little or no training before being thrust into the front line.  Overall, the situation has improved in Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East in recent years, while new generations of children are at risk in Africa and parts of Asia and the Pacific.  One of the most disturbing trends is the fact that they are increasingly being recruited as children because of their value as children rather than because there is a shortage of adults.  They are being recruited because their recruitment can be used to terrorize and control communities and because children can be drugged or conditioned more easily into violence and committing atrocities.  Hopefully, the following article and quotes will provide you with a deeper understanding of the issues faced by child soldiers worldwide.  If you want to read more, consider the book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah (2008)

Stolen Kids Turned Into Terrifying Killers
12 February 2007, Ann O'Neill, CNN

                Warlords are forcing children in conflicts around the world to become killing machines -- nothing more than what one child advocate calls "cannon fodder."
Some children are kidnapped from their schools or their beds, some are recruited after seeing their parents slaughtered, some may even choose to join the militias as their best hope for survival in war-torn countries from Colombia, and across Africa and the Middle East, to south Asia.
Once recruited, many are brainwashed, trained, given drugs and then sent into battle with orders to kill.
There is no escape for what the United Nations and human rights groups estimate are 250,000 child soldiers today. These children, some as young as 8, become fighters, sex slaves, spies and even human shields.
Sometimes their guns are taller than they are. But the child soldiers can be frighteningly cold and effective, according to CNN Africa correspondent Jeff Koinange.
He said they take macho noms de guerre like "Col. Rambo" and "Brig. Chop Them Up."
"The saddest part is we, as adults, had to address them as such," he added. "Otherwise you just never knew what would happen."
The children's very vulnerability makes them attractive to the men leading militias, according to Jo Becker, who has interviewed former child soldiers in Sri Lanka, Nepal, Uganda and Myanmar for Human Rights Watch.
They are easy to manipulate and will do the unspeakable without question or protest, partly because their morals and value systems are not yet fully formed, she said. In some cultures, child soldiers -- 40 percent of whom can be girls -- are considered expendable "cannon fodder," she said.
The journey from boy or girl to killing machine follows a horrifying route of indoctrination, including being forced to execute friends and family, international organizations report.
One girl, Angela, 12, told Human Rights Watch she was told to shoot a friend when she joined Colombia's FARC guerrillas.
"I closed my eyes and fired the gun, but I didn't hit her. So I shot again," she said. "I had to bury her and put dirt on top of her. The commander said, 'You'll have to do this many more times, and you'll have to learn not to cry.' "
An indictment against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo asserts that one of his commanders threatened to shoot a 13-year-old girl unless she tied the testicles of a prisoner with wire. She complied and the captive died.
In Myanmar -- formerly known as Burma -- a boy who was 11 when he was recruited to the national army, had to watch as older soldiers gunned down mothers and then killed their babies. "They swung them by their legs and smashed them against a rock. I saw it," Kim Muang Than told Human Rights Watch.
Officials with the United Nations, UNICEF and human rights groups said they are seeing promising signs, 20 years after the United Nations first addressed the issue.
Child soldiers were on the agenda for a U.N. Security Council working committee Friday. The committee discussed how rebel groups in Nepal and Sri Lanka use children to fight. Action against militias in the Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo was also considered.
Last week, 58 countries and nongovernmental agencies signed a treaty to do more to free current and potential child soldiers from peril. And, on January 29, the International Criminal Court forged ahead with its first war crimes prosecution, targeting Lubanga on charges of recruiting child soldiers The act was declared a war crime when the ICC was established in 2002.
"In the past there haven't been consequences against the commanders," said Becker, of Human Rights Watch. "This sends a signal to the groups that the world is paying attention now, you can be jailed for life and your assets can be frozen."
"I think we've come a long way," said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the United Nations' envoy for children and armed conflict. "Ten years ago this was an invisible issue."
Since last summer, groups in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Somalia have been referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
But there are many, many more. Child soldiers have been used in the past decade in more than 30 countries, according to the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which said young fighters were active in at least 19 countries last year. Coomaraswamy sees the Middle East, Sudan's Darfur and eastern Chad as the new trouble spots.
There are also concerns in Asia, with Human Rights Watch posting reports in January alleging violations by Maoist forces in Nepal and an offshoot of the Tamil Tigers rebel group in Sri Lanka.
"We're no longer just pointing fingers at rebel groups or government armies," said Human Rights Watch's Becker. "Now we're holding individual commanders accountable for their crimes."
U.N. envoy Coomaraswamy is taking an optimistic long view. "I think this is a little bit like the campaign against slavery in the late 19th century," she said. "There's such an abhorrence of it on an international level."
But much remains to be done, she cautioned. Funds must be found and steps taken to restore some sense of normal life for children numbed and hardened by their war experiences. In many cases, she said, their families don't want them and they are shunned by villagers.
Abandoned, they find little to eat, have nothing to do and scant hope for the future, Coomaraswamy said.
Without intervention, they could grow up to become a lost generation of migrant professional killers.

Quotes from Abductees
"I remember the day I decided to join the mayi-mayi [a rebel group]. It was after an attack on my village. My parents, and also my grand-father were killed and I was running. I was so scared. I lost everyone; I had nowhere to go and no food to eat. In the mayi-mayi I thought I would be protected, but it was hard. I would see others die in front of me. I was hungry very often, and I was scared. Sometimes they would whip me, sometimes very hard. They used to say that it would make me a better fighter. One day, they whipped my [11-year-old] friend to death because he had not killed the enemy. Also, what I did not like is to hear the girls, our friends, crying because the soldiers would rape them."
"They took us as wives straightaway. We had to cook for them. If a cow was killed, we had to cook it...When they came back, they would eat and drink, then they would call for you. They were so many. It was so painful...If they went to attack somewhere or to loot, there was always someone who stayed behind. Then he'd call you. If you refused, they used sticks to whip you...We mostly stayed in the forest but sometimes we had to go with them and carry what they looted...They all had sex with me. I don't know how many people had sex with me. A man would come, then another and another. I wasn't even the youngest. Some girls were even younger than me. Even the commanders called for you. You couldn't refuse...They said they'd kill you if you ran away. Some people fled and didn't come back. We didn't know if they'd got away or had been killed."
"When the mayi-mayi attacked my village, we all ran away...the soldiers captured all the girls, even the very young. Once with the soldiers, you were forced to "marry" one of the soldiers…If you refused, they would kill you...They would slaughter people like chickens…. Wherever we were fighting, along the way, they would take the women and girls working in the fields...They would take young girls, remove their clothes, and then would rape them...My "husband" did not beat me too often. ..But one day, he was killed in an attack. I felt I was in danger and I should leave. On the way, as I was pregnant, I had my baby. I was alone in the bush, without medication. I still have pain from this."
"My commander gave me a gun, cocked it, and said: 'Kill him.'  The prisoner was standing about five feet away.  He was crying, begging: 'Don't shoot me, please don't shoot.'  I had no feelings.  I just fired."
"Some families will never, never accept these boys back.  They are afraid.  Neighbors have seen the children burning down houses, cutting off people's hands.  These are not easy things to forgive."
"They gave me drugs.  They cut my skin with a razor, put cocaine inside, and put a plaster on top.  It gave me the will to fight."
"We have a hot tempter.  We appear in a town, we raid.  When someone moves, I just shoot.  Anyone who moves I drop him.  I am shooting my enemy.  When I kill, I loot.  I take anything he has.  That way we could have good food to eat."
"Chiefs of warfare reach out to children precisely because they are innocent, malleable, impressionable.  You can mold them into a ruthless, unquestioning instrument."
"I never thought of escaping because once, not too long after I'd been captured, a man tried to escape and when the rebels caught him they brought him to the camp, cut off his head, and placed it on a stick.  I became so afraid and knew I must never, never try to escape because they'd kill me too."
"I saw this father.  He spotted his daughter, who had been abducted months before.  She was tall and big, and he was trying to hug her and lift her in the air.  He couldn't do it.  But he kept trying to lift her up.  He was hugging her and crying."

Child Soldiers Reflection

Directions: After reading the article and quotes about child soldiers answer the following questions.  These questions require you to think about and analyze, so be through.  Do not simply write short, one or two sentence responses.

1) What sort of things happen to children who are abducted and forced into military service?  How do the abductors ensure the loyalty of the children they abduct?

2) Why would children be the ideal fighting force?  What drawbacks are there to using child combatants?

3) Who or what should be responsible for eliminating the use of child combatants?  How should that process be undertaken?  I am assuming that you do find the use of child combatants to be reprehensible; if you do not have a problem with the kidnapping and use of little kids as soldiers, pretend that you do when answering the questions.

4) Can you think of any possible problems with trying to eliminate the use of child soldiers?  What might those problems be?