Abuse of the Innocent: Child Soldiers

by Rachel M. O'Hara

A young boy from Padibe, Uganda was abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army, taken to the Sudan and forced to join this rebel military movement as a soldier. His officers forced him to kill another child. They made him drink the child's blood, sit on the dead body and eat food with unwashed hands. After a year, the boy's unit returned to Uganda. One day, soldiers sent the boy to guard the road. He fell asleep. Upon waking, he found that the other soldiers had left him. He hid his gun in the bush and walked until he found a church, where he told a pastor his story. The child led the members of the church council to the bush and showed them his gun. Later he returned to his family.

The boy's story is not uncommon, explains Anglican Bishop Macleord Baker Ochola of Uganda. But many children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army never come home.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, is the only international measure aimed at prohibiting the use of child soldiers. Only two countries, Somalia and the United States, have not signed the agreement.

According to Human Rights Watch, approximately 4,000 children have escaped from the Lord's Resistance Army during the past two years. However, an estimated 4,000 children still remain in the rebel force. Many of the abducted have been killed and will never be counted.

According to the United Nations Children's Fund, at least 250,000 children between the ages of 5 and 18 serve in either government or opposition forces in 36 countries around the world, including the Sudan, Rwanda, Burma, Colombia and Bosnia.

Why do children become soldiers? Children in war-torn countries often face starvation and the starvation of their family. To avoid dying of hunger, they join an army. They are told that army wages will be sent to their family.

Other children have witnessed the killing of members of their family and community by soldiers. Surrounded by violence and killing, they have come to believe that carrying a gun will bring them safety and provide them a family.

Many other children are forced to join. Soldiers move through villages, schools and streets forcing boys and girls into trucks. Particularly vulnerable are orphans and street children.

Commanders recruit children because modern technology makes it easy for children to serve as soldiers. Lightweight weapons are flooding international markets, and a child can carry and shoot an AK47 assault rifle as easily as an adult.

Children are also more easily moulded and manipulated than adults. Unaware of their own mortality and craving the acceptance of their new military community, they will step out into a minefield or throw themselves into open gunfire.

"Rites of passage" rituals are routinely inflicted on newly recruited children to desensitize them to violence, to cut their ties to the community and to strengthen their loyalties to the military. Children may be forced to return to their villages to torture and execute relatives, to join in the slaughter of other child soldiers who have attempted escape or to kill unarmed, bound prisoners.

Child soldiers serve in a variety of positions, from cooking and carrying goods to digging latrines and minesweeping. Others carry weapons and engage in direct combat. Many children, particularly girls, are used by male soldiers for sex.

For instance, a girl from Palabek, Uganda was abducted at age 13 and forced to kill another girl. She was made to stay with a soldier as his "wife". After two years in the Sudan, the army returned to Uganda, where she fled her captors. Later, she attended a church service, and stayed behind to talk with the church leaders. She told them that the girl she had killed haunted her. She was not able to sleep at night because the dead girl would appear, saying, "You have killed me for nothing."

When children leave the army, they face mental and social difficulties. They have witnessed extreme violence and in many cases have killed. Wandering without food or money, they have no skills to support themselves, no life to return to and often no home to reclaim.

Communities are often hesitant to welcome back these children. They have been used and have lost their childhood. They have learned that the way to solve problems is using a gun.

The 1989 U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child set the international limit on the age for recruitment, conscription and participation in conflict at 15. The U.N. continues to urge members to raise the permissible age to 18. However, the United States consistently resists this change, in part due to its practice of recruiting 17-year-olds.

Groups like Human Rights Watch insist that strengthening international laws to end the use of child soldiers is only one step. The psychological and emotional scars linger long after the battles are over. From Kosovo and Bosnia to Uganda and Angola and the other locations where the use of child soldiers is common, conflict resolution, counselling and education are needed.

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