| MY HOME SA LONE
AFRICAN MUSIC
AFRICAN CD STORE
AFRICAN PRIDE
SA LONE CONNECTION
FAVORITE LINKS
AFRICAN PLAYERZ
AFRO STYLE
SA LONE CULTURE
VIEW AFRICA
AFRICAN GUEST
SA LONE BEAUTY
MISS SIERRA LEONE VIBE
SIERRA KIDS
WOMEN OF COURAGE
HIP AFRO HOP
|
|
SIERRA LEONE CHILD
While in Sierra Leone a couple of summers ago, I visited Grafton Camp, a facility for recently demobilized child soldiers operated by UNICEF and local partners. Many of the boys, ranging from nine to 16 years of age, had killed people as they fought in a civil war that paused with a fragile cease-fire in 1995. The camp director said that when the youths had been given drugs-most likely, amphetamines-while soldiering, they "would do just about anything that was ordered." Some, he added, were proud of having been effective killers.
These boys, who had shortly before been willing to kill and who had never received an adequate foundation of moral development, danced with enormous energy and played cooperative games under the supervision of the camp's counselors. As I watched, it was sobering to think that under certain conditions, practically any child could be changed into a killer.
But today, it is even more sobering to see once again how easily children who have been denied education and trained for fighting are manipulated by local political leaders. Fighting has resumed in Sierra Leone following a May coup, and many of the combatants are under 18. They have become part of a continuing cycle of violence.
The nature of armed conflict has changed greatly in recent years. The end of the Cold War ushered in an era of ethnopolitical conflicts that are seldom fought on well-defined battlefields. Conflicts are increasingly internal, and they are characterized by butchery; violence against women, and atrocities sometimes committed by former neighbors. More than 80 percent of the victims are noncombatants, mostly women and children.
Increasingly children serve as combatants or as cooks, informants, porters, bodyguards, sentries, and spies. Many child soldiers belong to organized military units, wear uniforms, and receive explicit training, their lethality enhanced by the widespread availability of lightweight assault weapons. Other children participate in relatively unstructured but politically motivated acts of violence, such as throwing stones or planting bombs.
The use of children in armed conflict is global in scope-a far greater problem than suggested by the scant attention it has received. Child soldiers are found from Central America to the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, and from Belfast in the north to Angola in the south.
The problem defies gender boundaries. Girls are often forced into military activity-in Ethiopia, for instance, girls comprised about 25 percent of opposition forces in the civil war that ended in 1991. Typically, sexual victimization is a part of soldiering for girls, many of whom are forced to become "soldiers' wives." After the conflict ends, families and local communities may reject the girls as impure or unsuitable for marriage. Desperate to survive, many former girl soldiers become prostitutes.
The use of child soldiers violates international norms. The U. N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), signed in 1989 and ratified by more than 160 nations, establishes 15 years as the minimum recruitment age. In fact, most countries have endorsed an optional protocol that boosts the minimum recruitment age to 18 years. But in the face of armed conflict, military units in some nations-whether governmental or rebel-often pay little attention to age.
In Grafton Camp, children were encouraged to draw, and many drew pictures that reflected their war experiences. One showed a house being shelled by artillery. Soldiers fired at the house and at people in the street, who were fleeing.
Inside the house was a man who had been shot. Blood flowed from his midsection. I asked the artist, a small-for-his-age boy of nine, to tell me about the picture and what it showed. He explained that soldiers (the rebel forces) attacked his village, bombed his house, and came inside and shot his parents. The bleeding man was his father. I did not ask why he had not painted his mother, who had also been murdered.
How old was he when his parents were killed? "Seven," he said. I asked him what happened after the attack. "My parents died-the soldiers told me to go with them so I did."
I asked what he had done in the military. He had "carried things." When I asked if he had killed anyone, he said "No." But when asked if he would have killed someone if told to do so, the strength of his desire to survive showed. "Yes," he said. He would have done "what he had to do." When asked what he wanted for the future, he said, "I only want to go to school."
Child soldiers and insecurity Child soldiering violates the fundamental rights of children, exploits youth for political purposes, subjects them to slaughter and the ravages of war, and immerses them in a system that sanctions killing. And it also poses formidable security risks for others. A society that mobilizes and trains its young for war weaves violence into the fabric of life, increasing the likelihood that violence and war will be its future. Children who have been robbed of education and taught to kill often contribute to further militarization, lawlessness, and violence.
The use of child soldiers also threatens fragile cease-fires and blocks reconciliation and peace. Not infrequently, conflict continues at the local level even after a cease-fire has been signed. Child soldiers are pawns in local conflicts because they provide a ready group for recruitment by warlords, profiteers, and groups that foment political instability.
The problem is especially severe in developing countries, in which children constitute nearly half the population and in which children are often reared in a system that mixes war, poverty, violence, hunger, environmental degradation, and political instability.
The war in Angola, which ended in 1994 with a cease-fire, began more than 35 years ago as a liberation struggle, became a proxy war in the EastWest contest, and left a legacy of about 10 million land mines and several generations who have never known anything other than war.
On a recent visit to Luanda, the capital of Angola, I saw more child amputees in a day than one might see in a lifetime elsewhere, with the exception of Afghanistan and Cambodia. During the most intense fighting, from 199294, large numbers of children lost parents and their homes, and they suffered from extreme poverty and hunger. The scars, emotional as well as physical, are deep.
Many Angolan children report nightmares and flashbacks, display heightened aggressiveness, and suffer from hopelessness. Thousands of children-defined as people under 18 years of age-entered the military. For both parents and children, war had become normal.
Hopes for peace in Angola rose in April as a new government of national unity and reconciliation took office, and the cease-fire continued. Violent youths, however, may yet sabotage the cease-fire. Roving gangs of bandits terrorize and rob civilians in rural areas. Many of the bandits are boys who served in the military; they lack education and job skills, but they understand the power of a gun.
Banditry aside, Angola faces the question of how to demobilize and reintegrate into civil society thousands of underage soldiers, many of whom fear rejection by their communities and who lack skills needed to meet their basic needs through nonviolent means.
The problems cannot be addressed through political reforms or peace treaties alone. They require work at the grassroots level to reorient and help former child soldiers adapt to peace.
Unfortunately, tensions in Angola are strong. Underage soldiers provide ready fodder for war. In Angola, as elsewhere, it is the militarization of young people and of society that creates a climate in which protracted armed conflict flourishes.
|
|
|
KIDS FIGHTING FOR HELP
When the medical team arrived, children swarmed around the truck. |
|
|
WHAT ELSE IS THERE FOR US
Children at a camp for demobilised child soldiers.
|
|
|
NO TO AK47, YES TO EDUCATION
According to official estimates, 5,400 children fought in Sierra Leone's civil war, but UNICEF stresses that these are just estimates. A local group, Children Affected by War, believes the figure is probably closer to 10,000. One rebel group admitted in late 1999 that 30% of its combatants were children. |
|
|
WE'LL NEVER FORGET
Rebels in Sierra Leone cut off Lansana Sesay's hands, and now he is concerned about who will be there to help his children. He sings to his 15-month-old daughter, Jannet.
|
|
|
ELECTION 2002 & CHILDREN
|
|
|
SIAKA STEVEN STREET
|
|
|
SHELTER FOR ALL CHILDREN
|
|
|
