Chris Coulter, writing on the conflict in Sierra Leone, cited “drugs as the main reason explaining the absurd level of violence. ‘[T]hat is how they are brave to do all these things, without the drugs they cannot do it. Because I cannot stand and see my mother and kill her! But because of the drugs you can’t recognize who is standing in front of you,’ said Musu, one of my informants.” According to one former Mai Mai, cited in a briefing paper put out by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers in February 2010, “After taking a spoonful of [drugged] porridge, I cannot see the difference between men and animals.” Another former boy soldier described how “after taking the medicine, as soon as you hear a gunshot, you become crazy and seek it out, like a dog chases a hare.”
Grace Akallo, a former LRA soldier and a founder of the Network of Young People Affected by War (NYPAW), spoke to us during the CSI’s August 2009 round table in Halifax about how girl commanders would be especially brutal to their peers because they knew it was the way to get to command a unit. Once they were given command they would be sent off, at times with less than effective adult supervision and on rare occasions without any supervision at all, to do secondary harassment or scavenging tasks. Some of the girls would then attempt (and on rare occasions succeed) in leading their group to freedom.
In traditional African societies, age always was and still is greatly respected, and children simply do not disobey or cause trouble without risking instant discipline from elders. This feature of typical society has been even more instilled in the child soldier through training, socialization and combat experiences. At the NYPAW round table, participants told us how their leaders provided a sense of family and community to child combatants: “Children who come from a culture where they are accustomed to being raised in a communal environment and taught to respect all figures of authority are especially able to feel comfortable in this environment.”
The corollary of this perversion of social norms is the shock value presented by child soldiers, simply because they upset the child’s deference to his or her elders. An unruly child with an AK-47 is a terrifying sight if for no other reason than it represents an awful combination of unpredictable willfulness and naked power along with a complete reversal of the traditional role of children.
Knowing that there is a large pool of their own children who might be turned into soldiers—and that they can do little to prevent it—poses an added dimension to the terror such forces wield in these civil wars. The civilians of this central African region live among and love the same children who may one day come back and kill them.
Another dimension of the use and effectiveness of child soldiers is when they are used against rival or foreign fighting forces. Children pile an extra moral weight onto those they attack. Soldiers fighting against children must constantly question the legitimacy of their actions at the same time that they struggle to overcome their natural tendency to hesitate to pull the trigger. The laws of armed combat explicitly state that the fundamental right of every individual combatant is the right to self-defence. Over the past twenty years, a full spectrum of foreign protection forces, with regrettably large variations in capabilities and effectiveness and involving well over 100,000 peacekeepers, has been deployed with nearly two dozen UN missions in conflicts where child soldiers are used in tactical altercations and yet their rules of engagement (ROE) do not specify any special procedure to employ when using force against child soldiers, either when the peacekeeper’s life is directly at risk or when the task could be compromised. Any moment of hesitation on the part of the protection forces, be they foreign or national, can provide a tactical advantage to those who use the child soldier weapon system. The LRA’s Joseph Kony pursued an added agenda when he frequently placed child soldiers at the front in battle in hopes that the media outrage over their deaths would hamper government military action against him. The Acholi people, who are preyed upon by the LRA and whose children are abducted by Kony’s forces, became hugely critical of the Ugandan government efforts to fight Kony for just that reason: it was their children who were being killed, no matter that they themselves were killers. As P.W. Singer observes, fighting child soldiers “presents a public affairs nightmare that adversaries may seek to exploit. A primary worry for militaries facing child soldiers is that a traditional measure of success in defeating their opponent may end up undermining their domestic support, as well as sway international opinion.”
There is a serious vacuum in the tactical responses by militaries and related security forces to the use of child soldiers in conflict zones. It is the aim of the CSI, as I’ll discuss in chapter nine, to define this critical operational deficiency, develop a new conceptual base for neutralizing this very effective weapon system in the field and prevent its reinforcement by new recruits. From that rigorous conceptual base, we will develop the doctrines or principles required to create the tactics, equipment, drills and training, and organization we need to stop the outright slaughter of these children.
And there is a more insidious, and terrifying, impact on soldiers who have been attacked frequently by children from an unprofessional, borderline criminal force. Through fear for their own safety, the loss of comrades in battle, humiliating engagements that turn against them, and witnessing the scale of brutality drugged and indoctrinated children can visit on the innocent, they may begin to regard all children as potential opponents and commit abuses against any group of children they suspect.
Children are also employed in acts of terror, including suicide attacks against the opposing military or against civilians. Children are so plentiful in developing, overpopulated societies that one with a grenade can easily slip unnoticed through a checkpoint or loiter in an area and then use himself as a human bomb, destroying his target and in the process himself, out of some warped and drug-induced loyalty to the cause. They are also used as an instrument of terror against civilians through a combination of drug-assisted atrocities or whimsically savage attacks. The Mai Mai rebels and the Interahamwe militia in the Congo best demonstrate the continued application of this style of terror and have too often successfully destabilized the whole eastern region of that huge country and taken the civil war beyond national borders, with devastating consequences for millions of innocent civilians.
In addition to having combat and terror roles, child soldiers are the backbone of the logistics support train. Both government and non-state belligerents in the Great Lakes Region, for instance, lack transportation and even if they have transport, only a few roads can be used as main supply routes. The bulk of the road network, which traverses difficult terrain, is often impassible due to erosion and lack of maintenance. The best way to move heavy loads from place to place is along narrow tracks through forests and ravines and around mountains, employing large numbers of slender children as pack animals. Where the terrain allows, and the loads are very heavy—bulky munitions boxes, for example—commanders increase the load-bearing capacity of children by putting them on bicycles.
Where combat occurs in conditions of food scarcity, children are sent to forage for wild foods, barter for supplies in local markets, and steal food at the point of a gun from humanitarian agencies or local farmers. For example, both the government and the rebel forces in the Burundi civil war collected many child recruits during the drought of 2000 to 2001. Children were driven by insecurity, being orphaned or going hungry to attach themselves to these fighting forces, and though they were seldom used in actual combat, they acted as porters, errand-runners, launderers, cooks and sometimes even as nurses of the wounded.
Child soldiers can also be employed as spies or scouts in reconnaissance and information-gathering tasks. The particular advantage of children is that they can generally move without drawing much attention. This is particularly so in populous countries where children are found in large numbers and spend much of their day unsupervised. In normal conditions, most adults view children as objects of affection rather than fear or suspicion. To those who employ chil
dren as soldiers, this provides an advantage as the children can get close to security installations and other vital points, such as waterworks or electrical facilities, without attracting attention. They can become effective covert agents, spying or scouting for their superiors.
Similarly, children are also employed as couriers or messengers to deliver information from one location to another in the hope that they will not be stopped or even scrutinized by security forces or vigilantes at the ubiquitous road blocks. In Rwanda, in more recent times, attacks by the Hutu extremist group, the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR)—whose aim was to bring down the government of Paul Kagame and restore Hutu power—were often preceded by scouting missions conducted by children in the hope that Rwandan forces would let them pass, so that they could gather intelligence for their commander.
To sum up, children have military capabilities, net operational advantages and tactical effectiveness that make their employment attractive to unscrupulous commanders. They can effectively fight with the light weapons most commonly in use in conflict zones and they have proven to be fanatically brave front-line soldiers. They are highly effective weapons of terror in failing states and have become the weapon of choice. They can perform a host of menial but essential logistics and support tasks that free combatants (soldiers and other children) for operational duties. They can also be effective when employed in collecting intelligence as spies, scouts, early warning systems, couriers or guards. The girls and some young boys are sexually abused and are traded like commodities to satisfy the perversions of men and older boys.
Given that all these children are considered expendable and easily replaced from a seemingly limitless pool of potential recruits, criminal commanders in the imploding nations of sub-Saharan Africa, especially, have developed child soldiers into a sustainable, low-technology weapon system of choice. They have come up with cunning and ruthless tactics, child-led combat unit structures, low-technology equipment needs, and rudimentary training methods and standards that maximize the effectiveness of the young bodies and minds at their disposal. These criminal commanders have in essence developed a child soldier doctrine that may vary slightly according to local custom but whose principles are startlingly the same: it’s by understanding those principles that we will develop the most effective ways of neutralizing this relatively new and inhumane weapon system.
But first I’d like to explore one more aspect of the reality of the child soldier. As though the tragedy of their employment as soldiers is not enough hardship for these children to endure, the one thing we know about wars is that all of them eventually end. And when they do, what becomes of the child soldiers?
Children who make it out alive will most certainly have a myriad of social, physical and emotional problems to deal with. Often they have witnessed or been the perpetrators of unimaginable atrocities; also, they can be diseased, drug-addicted and suffering the physical wounds of war, which can become permanent handicaps due to a lack of medical care and unhygienic recovery conditions. They find themselves on their own, with no family or friends to speak of, and on the search for a means of survival. Some will return to their villages or drift to the big cities where they’ve heard work can be found, but civilian life is not so easy to adjust to, especially since most of them are illiterate, accustomed to using force to gain what they want and need, and have lost all proof of their identities and of their existence. They have been taught by their commanders that the end of the war is the end of their purpose.
The lucky ones (although they don’t always know it at the time) are able to leave their roles as soldiers early because their release has been negotiated by UNICEF or other NGOs, international agencies and possibly even national and foreign politicians or diplomats prior to a ceasefire or the end of the conflict. Those who are not so lucky will be ultimately subjected to a demobilization process that does not clearly identify them for what they are or have been and as a result may totally miss the mark as it tries to restore these children to a semblance of normality in a country often still hovering between nation building and relapses into conflict.
The next chapter will look at how child soldiers are currently disarmed, demobilized, rehabilitated and reintegrated, and the ways in which they then need to fight to regain their childhoods. These bush-wise but still immature souls in small bodies have to slowly begin to unlearn the ruthless and perverse skills that have been inculcated in them, wean themselves from the drugs and booze used to control them, and forget—or transcend, with sometimes surprising resilience—the fundamentally predatory experiences that led to their survival in the bush.
7.
HOW TO UNMAKE A CHILD SOLDIER
WHAT I KNOW FOR CERTAIN from studying child soldiers for the better part of a decade is this: picking up the pieces of broken children after a conflict is hugely difficult, the necessary and ongoing effort is hard to sustain, and success is unpredictable to gauge. In this chapter I will sketch some of the features of this troubling terrain, which the UN, peacekeeping and humanitarian communities have labelled DDR, for disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. That final R stretches to cover many other r words—reinsertion, rehabilitation, reconciliation, reconstruction, repatriation—all of them so difficult to achieve. I will say it again: it’s better to stop the recruitment and use of children within belligerent forces before it happens than to deal with the complexities of reintegrating children into their home communities—if they even exist—after the conflict is over. Former child soldier and rapper Emmanuel Jal eloquently captured the nature of the damage and the struggle of healing in the lyrics to his song “Baakiwara”: “I’m in another war / This time / It’s my soul that I’m fighting for.”
The fact also stands that no matter the good intentions and agreed-to protocols, dealing with war-affected children and child soldiers is rarely a top priority among the international and domestic players as they attempt to put together the pieces of a viable nation state after a conflict has ended. This shouldn’t be a surprise. What political entity in developed and stable countries actually pays more than lip service to putting the needs of children first or to “remembering” how important it is to our future to protect a child’s sense of wonder and imagination, his or her capacity to dream and grow? No, we grow up and are told to put aside childish things, and we largely buy in to that: our education systems, in North America at least, have grown increasingly utilitarian and cost-sensitive, cutting libraries, art programmes, music, any essential that doesn’t easily fit inside stretched educational budgets. We abandon our own poorest children to struggle on their own to lift themselves out of their circumstances; child poverty rates in the United States and in parts of Canada, particularly among aboriginal communities, are shocking in countries of such national wealth and resources. In my own homeland, one in nine children lives below the poverty line.
In a war zone finally grasping for peace, the tendency in the past has been to ignore the children: the “adults” basically decided that there were more important “adult” issues to be responded to than the fate of the children and youths who had been caught up in the fighting or who had been innocently pushed hither and yon as the conflict raged. But this near-automatic relegation of war-affected children—including child soldiers, the actual perpetrators of much of the human destruction—to the status of “we’ll deal with them later” is slowly changing, as we realize how greatly such an attitude inhibits a stable reconciliation and rebuilding process. Or at least the language is changing. Most recent peace agreements include specific language on child soldiers, as well as outlining ways to address their needs in the demobilization and reintegration process. The implementation of these measures, however, is still shaky, and though the right noises are made all the way up the chain of command, and the UN appoints child protection officers to serve in its missions, the fact is these advocates for children often have to fight to gain the attention of the mission’s senior leadership in order to claim their share of resou
rces and effort.
It’s so easy to fall into the old pattern of thinking, “Hey, they are just kids. Once we get the politics, the relief and the support structure that will appease all the main actors—from the ex-belligerent leaders to the NGOs to the nascent reconstituted government and its integrated security forces—we can deal with the ‘social’ problems, those softer areas that include women and children and community health and education.” Generally speaking, the people running the show on all sides—both the strategic bodies, such as the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Security Council, which produce the peacekeeping mandates, and the field missions that attempt to enforce them and are always hard-pressed by time and resources to produce tangible near-term results—regard child soldiers as an annoyance, a pain in the side, a social-adjustment problem meriting a minimum of effort. The UN can only push an agenda if it has buy-in from its member nations, and if child soldiers are not a priority for those nation states, funding and resources for DDR programmes can be hard to maintain. In case that seems inexplicable to you, remember that child soldiers may have better access to food and medicine inside their armed groups than they will have after they’ve been repatriated to their home communities, and both the children and the people who attempt to demobilize them know that. These same child soldiers have been, and probably still are, wreaking havoc and reinforcing the power grabs being made by the leaders on all sides as the conflict winds down, which also muddies the situation for the people who have to deal with them.