The historical and social circumstances I’ve just discussed set the stage for the abduction and recruitment of children, but there are also a number of practical motivations for governments, armies, rebel groups and even bandit gangs to choose to recruit children.
First and foremost among these practical reasons is numbers: the number of conflicts that require ever-increasing numbers of soldiers combined with the ever-increasing number of children.
Although the numbers of international conflicts are reported to be going down, according to a recent article in Foreign Policy magazine by Jeffrey Gettleman, called “Africa’s Forever Wars,”
There is a very simple reason why some of Africa’s bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don’t have much of an ideology; they don’t have clear goals. They couldn’t care less about taking over capitals or major cities—in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today’s rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people’s children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent’s most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find.
Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone and the author of the memoir A Long Way Gone, reinforced that point in an interview he gave to the New York Times after his book came out: “There might have been a little rhetoric at the beginning. But very quickly the ideology gets lost. And then it just becomes a bloodbath, a way for the commanders to plunder, a war of madness.”
Outright bandits are taking full advantage of failing states—with their weak or non-existent import-export laws and lack of control over natural resources—to run criminal enterprises that trade those precious resources on the international market. The focus of this book is the use of children in armed conflict, but a parallel and reinforcing issue to keep in mind is the recruitment of children as slave labourers, moving such things as diamonds, drugs, precious woods and coltan—a mineral essential for cellphones—illegally to foreign markets. Ineffective border controls and weak enforcement agencies open the door wide for massive illegal employment of child labour in resource extraction, under conditions that almost defy description: children forced to dig holes metres deep and crawl along shafts barely big enough for them to move through, risking their lives in cave-ins to get at gold or other minerals. When shafts collapse on them, they are buried alive—abandoned in the “graves” they dug themselves—and the bandits simply start a new mine a few metres away and send in the next wave of child labourers. Many children, usually under armed guard and against their will, are forced to slide into the mud and seeping water where surface diamond mining is conducted, and often drown.
Children are extensively used by “non-state actors,” as the jargon has it. According to the special representative of the secretary general of the UN for the DRC, “New cases of recruitment of children have been attributed to Coalition des patriotes résistants congolais (PARECO) (29 per cent), all Mai-Mai factions (32 per cent), CNDP [Congrès national pour la défense du peuple] (24 per cent) and Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) (13 per cent). A total of 1,098 children, including 48 girls, were documented to have separated from or escaped from armed groups.” Imagine how many haven’t escaped.
These forces fight for reasons that at times only they seem to be able to understand, and end up posing significant roadblocks to any peacekeepers or other actors attempting to prevent the failure of a state or to stabilize and reconstruct it after the fact. Such groups are ruthless, fully prepared to kill their own as well as the enemy in order to control their own areas of influence, outside any system of legal or democratic governance.
As well as the bandit gangs and wild-card non-state actors, there are the more classic freedom fighters or rebel groups, which use armed force in order to be “heard” on their issues and to protest injustices by the sovereign state to which they belong.
So the uses of child soldiers are multiplying even as the number of youths explodes compared to the rest of the population. Anyone who has visited the Great Lakes Region, or indeed many other conflict zones around the world, will be immediately struck by the sheer number of children. In most of these countries, children under eighteen years of age account for more than 50 per cent of the population. Rapidly falling fertility rates in most developing countries paradoxically have led to a “youth bulge”—the largest in history. The number of young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-four around the world stands at 1.3 billion and is expected to rise to about 1.5 billion in 2035 and then gradually decline. Fertility rates are declining but there is still a large child-bearing population, which means more babies born overall, until that point when the proportion of the population of child-bearing age begins to decline. Only then will the number of youths begin to drop.
In the meantime, the world around them makes no sense and offers little security, and so a large generation of youths, meant to be workers, teachers, parents, leaders, are ripe for the picking by those adults who seek to recruit foot soldiers and who can offer a bit of hope, inclusiveness, money, drugs, uniforms, chants, rallies, power over peers, and even a cause, no matter how warped (ethnic-based racism, for instance).
This simple demographic fact leads us to one of the saddest reasons why children are preferred to adults as soldiers: they are viewed as expendable, replaceable. Not in all cases, but too often, these child recruits are pushed to the front to take the brunt of an attack and the bulk of its casualties, because they can be replaced by the seemingly endless pool of available children. Children as young as seven are not viewed by the adult commanders who abduct or recruit them as precious human beings but as easily used, abused and disposable tools—cheap weapon systems that can be discarded when broken, and replaced. Tapping these child “resources” is like having a weapons arsenal in continuous production—a source of crass power available in limitless quantity, with no credible counter-weapon to neutralize it. Child soldiers are a commander’s dream come true: the perfect low-technology, cheap and expendable weapon system, which can perpetuate itself ad infinitum.
Beyond their plenitude, children are also desirable because they are psychologically more vulnerable and can be easily manipulated, especially when they have been separated from their families. They will transfer loyalty to another adult, especially one who holds the power of reward and punishment. They can be psychologically manipulated through a deliberate programme of starvation, thirst, fatigue, voodoo, indoctrination, beatings, the use of drugs or alcohol, and even sexual abuse to render them compliant to the new norms of child soldiering.
Children, especially the very young, are also easy and cheap to maintain. They eat and drink less, they are not paid, they do not have to be particularly well clothed, sheltered, armed or logistically sustained. They can also provide advantages within an actual logistics system. They can be employed to do the kind of chores they have been doing since they were able to walk. They can carry supplies, they can fetch water, they can scrounge and prepare food, they can do laundry.
Certain groups, such as the Mai Mai (a general term for local militias in and around the Congo), seek out children to join their armed forces because they believe that children have mystical powers of protection, making them ideal guards for commanders and front-line fighters. The “purity” of these youths also renders them ideal to prepare and administer magic potions and tattoos to protect the adult soldiers without sullying the magical properties of these rituals. For the children, participation in such rituals is believed to make them invulnerable; under the influence of hallucinatory herbs and potions, they become fearless attackers.
Similar rituals and magic charms are used in areas of northern Uganda by traditional healers, who have been co-opted by rebel groups to m
ake child soldiers “bulletproof.” For many in the region, boys and girls provide good “juju” (spirit magic) simply because they are children. Girls, especially, are believed to be able to share these protective traits through sex—a belief that has dire implications for female abductees or recruits.
The most direct method of manipulating these children—more basic than drugs, occult rituals, charms and repetitive exposure to violence, both as victim and perpetrator—is simply fear. Drug- or voodoo-induced states of utter fearlessness are temporary: these children survive in a constant state of fear and vulnerability, with often irreparable damage to their minds and souls.
And, in their own right, they can become effective as weapons of terror and as weapons of hesitation, not to mention at honing skills in areas of logistics and reconnaissance. Adults do not usually view children, especially the very young, as a threat. This underestimation can be manipulated by ruthless leaders who will persuade their child troops to sacrifice their lives or use their age to strike blows of terror against their opponents.
In addition, the psychological reluctance of adults, including Western soldiers or police officers, to kill children in self-defence leads to situations where they at times hesitate to counterattack, which can provide a tactical advantage to the ruthless commander.
Children are also ideally suited to tasks of information collection or intelligence. Whereas adults hanging around a military establishment or forward line will generate suspicion, children in this region are ever-present, always inquisitive and watching adults. They can spy in an enemy camp, they can listen in a market, they can give warning—they can see without being seen or noticed and provide valuable information to their force.
In countries where the conflict has been ongoing for some time, this tactic can fail, as locals have become wary of groups of young boys, and sometimes girls, who appear in their villages or marketplaces. Even a lone child who is seeking nothing in particular but who is not from the area runs the risk of being treated as a threat, though he may be innocently lost, abandoned, hungry or otherwise in need of adult care and sympathy. The ultimate gross violation is that when child soldiers are demobilized and in the process of reintegration, adults fear them because of the risk that they will revert to the use of force to gain what they want.
The perversion of the common order of life is staggering—this in the region where the concept that it takes a village to raise a child originated. The fear of assault from armed soldiers, too often children, has upset the natural role of adults and elders as de facto guardians of all children.
All these reasons I’ve just mentioned have contributed to the creation of the child soldier. But the greatest tactical reason for the increased use of children in combat over the past few decades is the development and availability of small, lightweight weapons that do not require adult strength or skills to use and maintain. A child—boy or girl, even as young as nine or ten—who is used to hard physical labour can be easily trained to operate them.
The proliferation of light small arms, from pistols to assault rifles to light machine guns to rocket-propelled grenades, is one of the major vulnerabilities that can spark an easy descent into conflict in our world today. During the Cold War, both sides stocked huge arsenals of these weapons for rapid mobilization of the masses, and sold or provided them to so-called allies in the developing world. When the Cold War ended and the Eastern bloc (with its large arms industry and existing stockpiles) collapsed, many of these weapons found their way onto the international arms market, where merchants of death made them readily available at cheap cost.
Arms control specialists estimate there are over 650 million light, simple to use, deadly small arms cheaply available anywhere, anytime to those who wish to start, conduct and sustain an armed conflict. Responsible developed nations continue to manufacture about one million every year (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and the United States—being the biggest weapons producers) and almost no one is destroying the older versions when weapons are upgraded. Responsible civil servants in signatory countries, not wanting to waste valuable, although dated, public assets such as these, go through a complex international arms control and limitations process in order to assess potential buyers and then, according to the established but still less than wholly effective rules, sell them for the best possible price.
We have struck some international conventions to reduce the proliferation of small arms, but too many of these weapons already exist, and the implementation of non-proliferation measures is uneven. To add to the toothless nature of it all, there are no sanctions against offenders except the occasional embargo that is difficult to supervise and enforce.
If we can’t eliminate small arms, we could attempt to reduce their usefulness by cutting off the sources of ammunition, which is relatively expensive and not necessarily as readily available in the significant amounts required to conduct sustained combat operations. But once again, there are multiple producers and the scale of production is literally off the charts. Still, as I mentioned, belligerents need large amounts of cash to buy the projectiles of war, which brings us back to children again and the use of them—by both governments and other groups—as labourers mining and hauling gold, diamonds and coltan, or logging precious woods, to generate the cash. They become the instruments by which the funding is acquired to buy the ammunition so that other children can become instruments of war. A perfect circle of continued and sustainable war and death has been created.
So how can we effectively reduce the availability of the small arms and munitions that enables the use of child soldiers, among other evils? Strict enforcement of existing rules at the manufacturing and distribution points, strengthening embargoes, and enacting policies that require the outright destruction of decommissioned weaponry coupled with amnesty for anyone who turns in such weapons: these are all methods being applied in various conflict zones. But so far they have not proven their worth when it comes to stopping the flow. We need a much more deliberate political commitment to not only apply the rules as they exist today, but also to seek out and bring to justice illegal arms dealers, ending the impunity under which they operate. We also need to encourage our political leaders to tell their public servants to destroy surplus weaponry, not to sell it—except to legitimate states with legitimate security needs, and in extremis only.
Despite embargoes, there were so many guns readily available in Rwanda that I attempted to initiate a campaign before the genocide to buy all the weapons in the country. The result was similar to that of other such attempts in places like Sierra Leone, where the weapons that demobilizing soldiers turned in were junk—they usually hid the good ones in the bush “just in case.”
Finally—unfortunately—rather than revealing the unthinkable nature of this crime against humanity, there have been many “successful” examples over the past twenty years of notorious groups that have used child soldiers effectively. To name just a few: the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda (and now southern Sudan and the DRC); the Interahamwe (in Rwanda and the DRC); and both the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and the government militias in Sierra Leone.
As I wrote in the research paper I prepared on child soldiers for the Carr Center, it’s extremely hard for rational actors to understand what is going on and why:
Despite the fact that the children captured are of their own tribe, the LRA use[s] them mercilessly. To illustrate, the child sent to attack his own parents acts as both instrument of revenge and shield for the people standing behind him; the child driven to her death beneath a load of loot she can no longer carry is reduced to the status of disposable object; the girl forced into “marriage” with an LRA warrior has value only as an instrument of labour and sexual satisfaction. It is hard to explain this conduct without resort to highly pejorative terms. To kill, to enslave, to torture with some overall goal in mind is at least explainable in rational terms, no matter how m
uch one might deplore such activities. But to perpetrate atrocities without any externally understandable ultimate goal is to indulge in incomprehensible violence.
Horribly, child soldiers continue to be used in conflicts throughout the world because there are leaders—political and military, governmental or non-governmental, soldiers or thugs and thieves—who have achieved “success” through using them, and who are ruthless, apathetic and amoral enough to continue to recruit, employ, abuse and destroy children. These leaders are criminals who must be held responsible and accountable for their abuse of children and their violation of international law. Impunity must be erased and the legal consequences imposed so severely that the mere thought of recruiting children to fight will be a non-option. To see the International Criminal Court (ICC) finally bringing to trial some of these adult leaders who recruited child soldiers is a step in the right direction, but success in this formal process is not yet truly within our grasp.
Here’s an example of how muddy the terrain can be, reported by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in a briefing paper on Mai Mai child soldier recruitment released in February 2010:
Gédéon Kyungu Mutanga, the commander of a Mai Mai Group based in Katanga province, having fallen foul of the President, was prosecuted along with 20 others on a range of charges including crimes against humanity and with war crimes relating to the recruitment of 300 children in Katanga province between 2003 and 2006. Although Gédéon and his co-defendants were convicted in March 2009 of having committed crimes against humanity and other serious crimes, the charges relating to child soldier recruitment and use were dropped after the judge ruled that war crimes charges were not admissible in the absence of a declaration of war.
They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children Page 11