Children are frequently organized into small teams in which group punishment is administered for any individual shortcoming. The mistake of one results in the punishment of all, up to and including the death penalty. Every child will rapidly become familiar with the chain of command (the hierarchy of authority and lines of communications) in their unit and will begin to seek a mentor or a role model, someone they can mimic to obtain praise, rewards and status within the group. In his rigorous study, Children at War, P.W. Singer writes, “Across regions, child soldiers typically take on nicknames. Some of the names are simply juvenile, such as ‘Lieutenant Dirty Bathe’ (because he never took a bath), while others are chilling, such as ‘Blood Never Dry’ … There is also often a physical aspect of reidentification in the indoctrination process. Many groups, such as the LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam], shave their children’s heads … This not only inculcates a break in identity, but also makes escapees easier to identify.”
Canny leaders also subject child recruits to some form of brainwashing as to why they are fighting, in order to build fanaticism. Ethnic, tribal, political or religious rationales will be endlessly drilled into them, especially in times of hunger, fatigue or thirst, or with the reinforcement of drugs, be they marijuana, hashish or a mix of gunpowder with cocaine. Joseph Kony, the infamous leader of the LRA, combines ethnic hatred and religion in a toxic stew of hate, magic and twisted Christianity to empower his child fighters; he preaches that he is a direct conduit of the word of God, as well as a spirit medium, sent to found a Christian state based on the Ten Commandments and Acholi tribal traditions. How rape, murder and mutilation can serve such a “Christian” purpose is anyone’s guess, but Kony’s group is a splinter of Alice Auma’s Holy Spirit Movement, which rose up to resist the Muslim advances of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, which in turn had overthrown the Acholi president of Uganda, Tito Okello. Children don’t need to understand all the political ins and outs: they just learn to believe in the magic powers of their leader, or else. Creating “instinctive” reactions to stimuli controlled by the commanders is the essence of the unwavering and robotic discipline that will ultimately overcome fear in combat and horror at the slaughter of other human beings in the most barbaric of ways.
When it comes to actual skills that might save their lives when they are sent into battle, most child recruits are taught basic weapons handling, such as stripping and assembling an assault rifle; loading, aiming and firing it; and caring for and maintaining their weapon and equipment. Endless repetition makes such basic skills automatic, especially those related to killing on command. Children may also be taught some basic drills, such as movement formations, ambush tactics, navigation and bushcraft. But the training is usually rudimentary, relying heavily on “on-the-job” experience. There is no theory or pedagogy here.
In Children at War, a South American fifteen-year-old child soldier identified as “R.” says, “My training was four and a half months. I learned how to use a compass, how to attack a police post, how to carry out an ambush, and the handling of weapons. By the end I was using an AK-47, a Galil, an R-15, mortars, pineapple grenades, M-26 grenades, and taucos (multiple grenade launcher).”
In the scheme of things, R. received extensive training for a child soldier. Usually the training process is short, because commanders regard these children as expendable and easily replaced. Only enough time and effort is spent on each recruit to achieve the minimum standard responses and blind reactions because there are always more where they came from. Those who learn quickly will survive their first encounters and gain experience in combat, and have a chance of becoming future child leaders; those who do not or who make mistakes will most likely be injured and abandoned or simply die in the battle zone. The commanders consider that the less time and resources wasted on training them the better.
Of note, however, is the amount of time such leaders spend on desensitization, as a method of indoctrination and a way to scare children into obedience. A twelve-year-old in Colombia recounts in Children at War: “If you join the paramilitaries … your first duty is to kill. They tell you, ‘Here you are going to kill.’ From the very beginning, they teach you how to kill. I mean when you arrive at the camp, the first thing they do is kill a guy, and if you are a recruit they call you over to prick at him, to chop off his hands and arms.”
Also, children are made to kill and maim their own as a means to desensitize them. The twelve-year-old Colombian also told Singer, “Seven weeks after I arrived there was combat. I was very scared … They killed one of us. We had to drink their blood to conquer our fear. Only the scared ones had to do it. I was the most scared of all, because I was the newest and the youngest.”
Ishmael Beah describes another, more familiar method of desensitization in A Long Way Gone: “We watched movies at night. War movies, Rambo: First Blood, Rambo II, Commando, and so on, with the aid of a generator or sometimes a car battery. We all wanted to be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques.”
From reading memoirs and extensive interviews with former child soldiers, it seems certain these training and socialization methods are fairly common to all the forces that employ children. While some factions, such as the LRA, may be more extreme, every training “programme” tries to quickly create a combatant with the minimum necessary skills to fight or operate in a combat environment; an obedient soldier, often drugged and living in outright fear of his or her elders and veteran peers, who will fanatically, without question or conscience or hesitation or even afterthought, execute any assigned order, including murder or mutilation; a soldier loyal to the leader, the cause and the group; and most important of all, a soldier blindly and unconsciously prepared to fight and die for that group. Do or die, kill or be killed, make your victims suffer and plead for their lives or lose yours, humiliate and mutilate others or bear witness to your own degrading demise, instill horror and fear in others or become the victim of trauma and the machete’s sharp blade.
What is the reaction of the children to this experience? Some will be brainwashed, suffer permanent physical damage to circuits in their heads and become fanatical soldiers—no, zombies—as the system intended them to become, however foreign to their natures that seems. Emmanuel Jal recalls in his memoir a night when an enemy had been killed, and people broke out in song: “Excitement rushed into my veins and the fear inside me trickled away as I sang. I was a soldier now. I could sleep with one eye open and stop myself from crying out even when I was beaten until piss and shit ran out of me. I knew there were eleven ways to attack a town; how to open, fuse, and throw a grenade; how to load and fire an AK-47; how to raise a machete and hack at an enemy or use stones as a weapon when my bullets ran out. There was nothing to be afraid of.”
Not surprisingly, the nascent sense of values of children caught in these civil wars often becomes dramatically warped, devoid of any respect for human life and conventions of any sort. Right is wrong and wrong is right. Killing is good and mercy is bad. Life has no value and obedience and loyalty are paramount. The mental abuse, traumas and violence necessarily result in a child who is badly damaged, and possibly permanently psychologically injured.
The intentional attack on the child’s sense of good and bad has complex consequences beyond simple destruction of the psyche. At a two-day round table that was sponsored by my Child Soldiers Initiative at Dalhousie University in August 2009, nine former child soldiers testified that they had volunteered because they had believed in the cause, that they liked their leaders and missed them when they were demobilized. After they left the field, they sometimes longed to go back: as with combat veterans everywhere, civilian life can be a pale imitation of war. Another complicating and particularly sad factor that affects and disorients child soldiers is that they are often recruited so young that they have little memory of life before they entered, either voluntarily or by force, the ranks of child soldiers.
The available literature rarely mentions the
children who wish they could return to the field and to a time when they had comrades and power, no matter how misused and horrifying, but instead often concentrates on the damage done to the children and on the catalogue of rights abuses suffered by these children. While this is useful and necessary, more needs to be said about how children are actually employed in front-line combat operations. In other words, we need to understand how they operate as a weapon system and the doctrine that “governs” them so that we can successfully neutralize their effect, render them ineffective, possibly even make them a liability to the user. I think this is the most effective way to eradicate this weapon from the inventory of tools of war.
My research and experience have led me to conclude that child soldiers are used and abused in four distinct areas of most force constructs: as front-line fighters, psychological weapons, logistics support and reconnaissance or information collectors. I’ll examine each category in turn.
Some non-state fighting forces in Uganda, Rwanda, the Congo and Burundi have been heavily dependent on children to provide the bulk of their infantry (such as the LRA and the RPF in their civil war). The Khartoum regime in the Sudan, for instance, did not set out to recruit children, but began targeting them after a recruiting drive designed to attract adult males into the armed forces failed.
The most common method of organizing child fighting elements is to put groups of children under the command of an absolute minimum number of adults. The basic organizational unit comprises ten to thirty children led by as many adults and older youths as are required to ensure sufficient control, intimidation and emotional authority. However, young boys and girls have been known to lead small groups of other children with efficacy, courage and relative competence. Quickly commanders learn to assess which children will be the most ruthless, which of them will make good leaders. Often they choose the most violent of a group.
The ruthlessness of these children can be breathtaking, impossible to take in. Mariatu Kamara, now a student living in Toronto as well as an ambassador for Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UNICEF special representative for children and armed conflict, grew up in Sierra Leone, and in her book, The Bite of the Mango (written with Susan McClelland), she describes how she became a double amputee:
Three boys hauled me up by the arms. I was kicking now, screaming, and trying to hit. But though they were little boys, I was tired and weak. They overpowered me. They led me behind the outhouse and stopped in front of a big rock.
Gunfire filled the night. The rebels were shooting up at the village, I assumed, and probably everyone left in it. “Allah, please let one of the bullets stray and hit me in the heart so I may die,” I prayed. I gave up the fight, and I surrendered my fate to the boys.
Beside the boulder, a shirtless man lay dead. Smaller rocks lay all around him. With a shock, I realized it was the pregnant woman’s husband. He traded goods from town to town, like the man who had given me palm oil. The woman who had been killed was his second wife, and the baby would have been his first child. Now the man’s face was nothing but a bloody pulp. I could even see parts of his brain. The rebels had stoned him to death.
“Please, please, please don’t do this to me,” I begged one of the boys. “I am the same age as you. You speak Temne. So you might be from around here. We would have been cousins, had we lived in the same village. Maybe we can be friends.”
“We’re not friends,” the boy scowled, pulling out his machete. “And we’re certainly not cousins.”
“I like you,” I implored, trying to get on his good side. “Why do you want to hurt someone who likes you?”
“Because I don’t want you to vote,” he said. One of the boys grabbed my right arm, and another stretched my hand over the flat part of the boulder.
“If you are going to chop off my hands, please just kill me,” I begged them.
“We’re not going to kill you,” one boy replied. “We want you to go to the president and show him what we did to you. You won’t be able to vote for him now. Ask the president to give you new hands.”
Two boys steadied me as my body began to sway. As the machete came down, things went silent. I closed my eyes tightly, but they popped open and I saw everything. It took the boy two attempts to cut off my right hand. The first swipe didn’t get through the bones, which I saw sticking out in all different shapes and sizes.
The hugely poignant last line of her chapter reads, “As my mind went dark, I remember asking myself: What is a president.”
Most of the forces that use children as soldiers adapt their weapons and tactics to their use, which is why I argue that they have become a weapon system. My research at the Carr Center was what led me to understand child fighters in this new light. As I wrote, “Child soldiers are an effective weapon of terror and it has so far not been possible to develop an alternative that falls within the correct orientation of our moral compass.” Rebel and other non-state organization leaders have quickly learned the impact that children with guns can have on adults, and they have mastered a tactical advantage by manipulating these little humans into leading the charge when they are facing armies of adults. P.W. Singer wrote that the “cover of children’s assumed innocence is also often utilized to a force’s advantage. In Iraq, rebel groups reportedly used children both as scouts and spies, particularly when targeting U.S. convoys”—presumably because U.S. soldiers would never expect children to be their enemies. Not only do children present moral dilemmas for legitimate forces, but they also throw the “game of war” into a tailspin. Gone are the days when our soldiers fought wars against enemies according to the laws of armed conflict, with clear battle lines and readily identifiable opponents.
In most cases, children actually begin their combat experience without weapons in hand but are introduced to them when they prove their reliability and when weapons are available. The ever-present AK-47 is the weapon of choice with older children, who progress to light machine guns like the RPK, rocket-propelled grenade launchers like the RPG family or even light mortars of the sixty-millimetre variety. Good performance is rewarded with a higher status weapon and increased responsibility and authority within the group. Most former child soldiers I have met have spoken quite fondly about their weapons and the power and security they brought them.
In actual combat, experience has demonstrated that children can typically be driven to emotional and even physical extremes more easily than adults.
After overcoming their initial reluctance and experiencing a favourable baptism by fire, many children become fearless and will actively seek the fight. Drugs are usually plentiful, aiding in the disinhibition and fearlessness displayed by these children and inducing dependency—another means of control used by the adults. In the conflicts of the Great Lakes Region, where operations have tended to be more fluid and less dependent on solid defensive positions that must be overcome by physical assault, child soldiers tend to be best employed in raids, ambushes, patrolling, and quick attacks on an unsuspecting enemy, in addition to looting and committing abuses of “enemy” civilians.
Some of the forces, like the LRA, employ child soldiers with no regard to their survival. Daily news releases, reports and testimonies speak to the fact that LRA commanders place no value on the lives of their soldiers. Children and adults are expendable and new recruits can be found just across the next border. Depriving their troops of food, water and medicine likely drives some of the violent looting when soldiers enter villages—pillaging being the only means of survival.
Other forces, such as the RPF, placed a high value on the lives of their soldiers and in return were rewarded with higher levels of loyalty and competence, as I observed when I conducted my reconnaissance before being posted to Kigali.
Nevertheless, the norm has been to push child soldiers to the front of offensive operations to draw fire, clear mines and booby traps with their bodies, and lead assaults. Such positioning usually results in children suffering the bulk of the casualties, leaving the adults to acquire t
he pillaged resources and reward the child survivors. For child soldiers, this may mean being forced into the attack by their commanders who stand behind them ready to shoot those who fail to show sufficient enthusiasm. Throwing children into battle and letting them fend for themselves seems to be the routine way for these children to get their bearings. This strategy is a modern perversion of the wise counsel of Sun Tzu, who advised in The Art of War that “troops in desperate straits know no fear. Where there is no escape, they stand firm; when they have entered deep, they persist; when they see no hope, they fight.” When you’re being shot at, you quickly learn how to avoid becoming an easy target and learn to combine the use of your weapon with evasive and advantageous manoeuvring. Kill or be killed.
Child soldiers appear to be as capable on the attack as adult fighters, and have regularly exhibited less fear and more aggression than adults when properly motivated. As P.W. Singer writes, “Children make very effective combatants. They don’t ask a lot of questions. They follow instructions, and they often don’t understand and aren’t able to evaluate the risks of going to war. Victims and witnesses often said they feared the children more than the adults because the child combatants had not developed an understanding of the value of life. They would do anything. They knew no fear. Especially when they were pumped up on drugs. They saw it as fun to go into battle.” Or they had been reduced to a level of desperation where the only survival option they could perceive was to attack ferociously in hopes of victory.
Child soldiers can also be employed as psychological weapons. Weak forces lacking the technical capacity to break the will of the enemy by employing overwhelming force to shatter an opponent must rely instead on human ingenuity—using the materials at hand and usually in a fashion that has come to be known as terrorism. Child soldiers are a particularly effective resource in this regard. The main, but not only, reason they can be employed as suicide bombers or walking improvised explosive devices (IEDs) is that, in most cases, they are forcibly drugged with stimulants that make them impervious to fear or pain.