Development in Action: Child Soldiers - how can the international community can best help those forced into battle instead of the classroom?

It is a fact that in conflicts across the globe children are still being actively recruited into government armies, militia gangs and paramilitary ranks, and in the process being dehumanised and denied a childhood. But how do children become involved in conflicts? What impact does this have on the child? Perhaps more importantly, what is being done by the development community to address the problem?

There are a several reasons why numbers of children involved directly in conflicts are on the increase. While some are driven into conflict by economic hardship and poverty, it is increasingly common to hear of children recruited under duress and forced to commit horrific acts of barbarism in the process. In Northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army are known to force young children to slaughter members of their own families in order to ‘blood’ them into killing, cruelly ensuring that they have nothing to return to should they desert. There have also been chilling reports of similar atrocities taking place in the protracted conflicts that Sierra Leone and Liberia have witnessed recently.

The attraction of ‘recruiting’ children, some as young as 8 years old, is that they are lightweight, mobile and easily expendable. Children are frequently used as the first wave of attack, as scouts looking for landmines and also as spies. Many young girls are used as sex slaves and are repeatedly raped.

It has also been noted that a child’s innocence can easily be manipulated and they can be brainwashed, or frightened, into obedience. This process turns children into fearless killing machines who have little understanding of the consequences of their actions. There is evidence that suggests this practice is aided by fuelling the children on alcohol and drugs in order to ‘pump’ them up and increase their bravery or barbarity, and turning them into juvenile addicts.

Such barbarity, it seems, is not only limited to the battlefield, as I discovered while visiting the notorious SK-21 detention centre in the heart of Phnom Pen, Pol Pot’s torture centre during his devastating reign over Cambodia. I was shocked to learn that the guards who tortured and killed thousands of academics and professionals were only between the ages of twelve and fifteen. It was the gloomy culmination to a thoroughly depressing day.

Two key factors in the increased numbers of child soldiers today are the pattern of recent conflicts and the abundance of modern, lightweight weaponry, such as the ubiquitous AK-47. Increasingly, conflicts are fought within national boundaries and are frequently struggles for power and access to resources, rather than traditional territorial wars. The focus of such conflicts is often the civilian population and in many cases across Africa they have become the targets of conflict. In many cases war has become what Mark Duffield, Professor of Development, Democratisation and Conflict at the University of Leeds, has called ‘low intensity predation’, where the conflict ebbs and flows, becoming protracted and almost a way of life.

This shift in the pattern of warfare has grave consequences for children as high civilian death tolls invariably mean high numbers of orphaned children left with few relatives and little hope. When you consider that schools will have been destroyed, crops burnt and relatives killed, the offer of a gun and the meal ticket that goes with it must be a relatively attractive proposition.

The abundance of the AK-47 across the globe is mainly due to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the eastern bloc. It is light, easy to use and has a relatively small kickback, in many ways the perfect weapon for a child. Given a couple of hand grenades and an AK-47, a small child can quickly become quite a fierce fighting machine.

Clearly conflict and war has a devastating effect on children and the issue is the topic of a recent United Nations report, entitled “The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children” written by Graça Machel, the UN Secretary-General’s expert on children. The report is a comprehensive study that highlights the issue of child soldiers but also draws attention to the impact of conflict on those children who are merely caught up in the fighting.

Some of the facts included in the report are shocking: children under 15 years of age are known to be fighting in 25 conflict zones; roughly 200,000 children under 16 years of age saw combat in 1988; 500,000 under-five year olds died as a result of armed conflicts in 1992; 40% of causalities killed in 4 months of 1995 in Chechnya were children; in Mozambique wartime damage has resulted in 1.32 million primary school aged children with no access to education.

While war and conflict destroys schools and infrastructure, it also deprives children of a stable childhood and, in most cases, the emotional and physical needs of a child simply cannot be addressed. The onset of peace and post-conflict mobilisation does little to alter this situation

The report notes that displaced children are very difficult to reintegrate into society as many have either fought as soldiers, committing mentally scarring atrocities as a result, or have been abused physically and sexually by forces on both sides of the conflict. The proliferation of rape as a ‘weapon’ of war is both deplorable and alarming, with widespread abuse noted in the Balkans, Rwanda and Uganda, to name but a few.

What happens to these children? With the infrastructure and social provision in post- conflict areas unable to meet basic needs, what hope is there for child soldiers to get the help and counselling that they clearly need? Uneducated and without the social skills needed to hold a stable job, many ex-child soldiers turn to crime in order to survive, perpetuating a cycle of destitution and law-breaking that is impossible to escape from.

So what is the international community doing to address these issues? The report mentioned above, while important for raising the profile of child soldiers in the media, will no doubt lead to very little actually being done. There is growing international consensus that the issue should be addressed and there have been some steps forward in the debate:

The International Criminal Court will now treat the use of child soldiers as a war crime;
The International Labour Office has defined child soldiering as a form of child labour and describes it as the worst possible form;
The UN, the EU, the African Union and many other organisations have condemned the use and abuse of children in conflict.

There are attempts to encourage the adoption of an Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would raise the minimum age of recruits to armed forces to 18. The UN has set the minimum age for peacekeepers at 18 and is encouraging its member nations to follow suit. One wonders how much success this initiative will have considering the minimum age of recruitment for the British Army is 16 years old.

The biggest problem that these measures will face is the fact that most armies will not admit to using children in their armed forces. Militias and paramilitaries are lawless and unaccountable, so any attempt to encourage a minimum age of 18 is more than likely to fail.

All that can be hoped for is that the threat to treat the recruitment of child soldiers as a war crime will serve as a deterrent to many, though the slow and bumbling war crime courts, both in Europe and Africa, will hardly strike fear into many.

Appendix (from http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/crp/where.htm)

The following are countries where child soldiers are reported to be fighting in recent and ongoing (2001) armed conflicts.

G indicates children are serving in government forces
P in paramilitaries, and
O in opposition forces.

Afghanistan	(all groups)	Iraq	(G,O)	Somalia	(all groups)
Algeria	(P.O)	Israel & OT	(G,O)	Sri Lanka	(O)
Angola	(G,O)	Lebanon	(O)	Sudan	(all groups)
Burundi	(G,O)	Mexico	(P,O)	Tajikistan	(O)
Chad	(G)	Myanmar	(G,O)	Turkey	(O)
Columbia	(P,O)	Nepal	(O)	Uganda	(G,O)
DR of Congo	(G,O)	Pakistan	(O)	Uzbekistan	(O)
East Timor	(P,O)	Papua New Guinea	(O)	Yugoslavia	(P,O)
Eritrea	(G)	Peru	(O)
Ethiopia	(G)	Philippines	(O)
India	(P,O)	Russian Fed	(O)
Indonesia	(P,O)	Rwanda	(G,O)
Iran	(G,O)	Solomon Islands	(O)