I’m going to add an extra R to DDR, to stand for all those other r words, and label it “DDRR” here. In theory, DDRR should be among the first steps in helping a country rebuild, allowing its citizens to return home to some form of normality and justice after the conflict has ended. The reality is that things are never that simple. As laid out in the introduction to the UN’s formalized standards for DDRR (called the IDDRS Framework, which was developed in the mid-2000s to share best practices in the world’s trouble zones), the objective is to “contribute to security and stability in post-conflict environments so that recovery and development can begin.” A great aim, for sure, but we must make sure these standards are well crafted to answer all the demobilized people’s needs. Right now, some of the most vulnerable—the millions of war-affected children, the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers—have limited access to the DDRR process. And, in some cases, the very process that is meant to help them ironically pushes them back into armed groups—government, insurgent or paramilitary—or bandit gangs and a life of crime.
Much has been written on these issues, and my aim here is not to rewrite what has already been written, but rather to attempt to shine light on the areas that are the most challenging. And yes, these challenges have also been written about to no end, but even so, we are still dropping the ball far too often when it comes to dealing with some of the most vulnerable populations in conflict and post-conflict settings. The UN has taken a significant leadership role, supported by its own agencies, such as UNICEF, and within some of its missions by the special representatives of the secretary general, and by dedicated work done by several field-focused NGOs, such as Save the Children, War Child, Search for Common Ground, World Vision and a number of others.
But nonetheless, we responsible and reasonable adults still seem far off the mark when dealing with rehabilitating war-affected children and child soldiers. I would contend that most of the r problems stem from weak performance from the same agencies I’ve just mentioned, who enter the field with great ambition and resolve, and talk a great battle, but seldom manage to muster the capacity to sustain the fight to achieve their own declared objectives. They also risk being mired in dogma, which can hamper new initiatives. UNICEF, for example, operates on the firm conviction that family reintegration is the answer to the problem of child soldiers, but so many other factors—skills training and employment to name just two—need to align for reintegration to be a success. If you focus on only one aspect, that’s where the bulk of your donors’ dollars go, which results in an imbalance of resources that undermines creating the complete package the child soldier needs to re-enter normal life. And we’re even further off the mark when it comes to addressing the complex needs of girl soldiers in DDRR programmes today (which I will specifically address at the end of this chapter).
Traditionally, DDRR programmes were created for adult male combatants in civil wars in order to disarm and reintegrate them into their communities after the war was over. However, increasingly over the last twenty years or so, women and children have also been taking up arms in war and, either voluntarily or by coercion, becoming combatants within the belligerent forces. They, too, need assistance once war has ended, but the needs of adult women, of boys and of girls are distinct from those of adult men. One size cannot fit all, but because of expediency and lack of resources, children and adults have often been processed under the same security and support conditions, which in effect ensure that the young ones remain under the sway of the adults who brought them such suffering and abuse. The early steps at establishing separate protocols for children suffered from the assumptions Ishmael Beah saw played out the first time he was offered up by his own commander to an NGO for DDRR: believing that all these children were longing to be “just kids” again, the aid workers housed demobilized boy soldiers from both sides of the conflict in the same facility, and the outcome was more violence. Those boys had to be taught, very carefully and with infinite patience, how to be boys again, how to give up their power as fighting units.
The UN’s IDDRS Framework defines two categories with respect to children and war:
Youth. While there is no internationally recognized legal definition of “youth,” young people associated with armed forces and groups make up an important part of society and can both fuel conflict and support post-conflict reconciliation and recovery. Many young ex-combatants may have been recruited as children, but not demobilized until they were young adults. They have therefore been denied normal socialization by families and communities, they have missed educational and vocational opportunities, and lack basic living skills. The design and delivery of DDR programmes shall consider the particular needs and potential of older children and younger adults associated with armed forces and groups. [Emphasis added.] DDR programmes designed for youth can also have a positive impact on young people in the community who may be at risk of recruitment by armed forces and groups or organized criminals.
Children. The recruitment of children into armed forces and groups is a serious violation of human rights and is prohibited under international law. The UN shall promote the unconditional release of children associated with fighting forces at all times, i.e., during open conflict, while peace negotiations are taking place and before the establishment of a national DDR process. The identification and management of children associated with armed forces and groups may in practice be quite difficult. While the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes 18 as the age of legal majority, concepts and experiences of childhood vary significantly among cultures and communities. Furthermore, children are likely to have taken on adult roles and responsibilities during conflict, either while associated with armed forces and groups or in war-affected communities.
Girl children in particular may be considered adults if they have been “married” during conflict, borne children or taken on responsibilities as heads of household in receiving communities. [Emphasis added.] Children formerly associated with armed forces and groups are stakeholders and must be carefully consulted when DDR processes are set up. To successfully cater for children’s needs, programme development and implementation should be designed to ensure the participation of all stakeholders, and reintegration strategies must be adapted to meet the different needs, roles and responsibilities of children in each post-conflict situation. To ease their return to civilian life, former child soldiers should be integrated into programmes that benefit all war-affected children.
The age criterion is one of the most challenging aspects in DDRR programming. How does one determine the age of a child who arrives at a disarming post with no identification, a child for whom chronological age probably was never really that important? Chronological age figures in all international standards. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the legal age of majority, but how is the concept of majority measured in reality? These children have often endured experiences that many adults in the developed world would fail to cope with, and as a result it is rare that the signpost of chronological age adequately captures their level of maturity. Age is not a universal construct delineating youth and childhood from adulthood. Though agencies are trying to recognize this issue, we still face considerable interpretive problems when we start drawing the age line among groups with respect to who is or isn’t entitled to participate in DDRR programmes.
There are too many examples where children have fallen through cracks and as a result have not been able to benefit from education, skills training or adoption opportunities, mostly because they have been denied any recognition as having been a child soldier due to lack of proof and witnesses who would speak on their behalf. During the course of a conflict, the child soldiers who do escape from their armed groups do not always have a designated safe place to go. If they attempt to surrender to whatever recognizable authority exists, they are not necessarily turned over to a benevolent NGO programme for demobilized children. Instead, as I pointed out in chapter five, they can face summary execution
or lengthy imprisonment for war crimes. Many child soldiers who desert have to flee in order to avoid both or all sides in the conflict and cannot return home. As I described in chapter six, many leaders force children to commit atrocities on friends, neighbours and even their own families expressly so they can’t go home again.
The 2008 Global Report by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers estimates that “fewer than half the returning child soldiers registered for demobilization with the UPDF [the Ugandan national army], fearing the army itself, or rejection by their communities if they were identified as LRA members. In one study, returning child soldiers in the Teso region reported extensive and persistent stigmatization and rejection by their communities and constant bullying by their peers at school.” This was aggravated by envy and jealousy in the community over the benefits these ex–child soldiers received in the DDRR programmes, which were not extended to war-affected children. How must it feel to be an orphan child, who has never raised a gun, and see a child soldier—who may have been the one to kill his family—receive food, schooling and support denied to the orphan?
The 2008 Global Report also showed that most female child soldiers in the DRC did not enter any official DDR programmes, “fearing stigmatization by their communities if they were identified as child soldiers. Others remained with their military ‘husbands’ for fear of violence and recrimination if they left. Only 12 per cent of formally demobilized children were girls, despite estimates that girls might have comprised up to 40 per cent of the total number of child soldiers during the armed conflict.” More proof that the challenges facing the girls dwarf the challenges facing the boys.
In order to show you this terrain more completely, I want to dissect current DDRR practices, looking for what they actually provide children and youth and where they fall short. It is not all bad news, but it will become evident that the commitment of resources and the sophistication of the process still leave a lot to be desired, and permit the continued destruction of these youths at the hands of their own people or, far too often, spur them to rejoin the very groups that stole their childhoods.
The first D we must deal with in DDRR is disarmament. Traditional DDR programmes demand that a person has to hand in a weapon to gain access to the process. However, as in the case of the conflict in Sierra Leone, after a ceasefire was established, child soldiers were not obliged to bring in their weapons. As a result, many of them hid their AK-47s in the bush or sold them to adults who cashed them in under the adult DDRR programmes.
And what of children who do not have a weapon to hand in? Those who were never armed? The Paris Principles agreed to in 2007 define a child soldier this way: “A child associated with an armed force or armed group refers to any person below 18 years of age who is, or who has been, recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking, or has taken, a direct part in hostilities.” But how are they meant to disarm if they do not have weapons to turn in? Chris Coulter explains the reality of this issue in Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: “More than half of all female ex-combatants I interviewed said that they had actually wanted to disarm, but only a handful did … Some of those who had wanted to disarm said that the reason they did not or could not was that they could not access a weapon.”
We have learned a lot about implementing DDRR, but we still make mistakes we are not learning from very quickly. “Cash for guns,” for example, was a popular incentive for getting children, youths and adults to disarm. However, my CIDA field deployment and fact-finding exercise with the rebel forces in Sierra Leone showed me that issuing cash payments to demobilizing children only made them more vulnerable to abuse. The money turned them into targets of adult attention and did not help with long-term reintegration plans at all. My research at the Carr Center reinforced that finding. In Liberia, for example, cash for guns constantly put the children’s well-being in jeopardy. As I wrote in my Carr Center paper: “Remunerating child combatants in this case seem[ed] to have been a naive gesture given the background level of corruption and the clear lack of complementary protective measures to ensure that the affected children’s rights to the payment were respected.” Today we find more innovative takes on this concept, such as “bikes for guns” or “goats for guns”—for the Mai Mai in the DRC, for example—all in a well-intentioned effort to get people to disarm. My long-time colleague Phil Lancaster (my executive assistant for the last two months of the UNAMIR mission in Rwanda, and a significant contributor to my research at Harvard) has worked extensively in the field with child soldiers, and in Burundi saw a bike programme work to the detriment of the children it was supposed to help—their older siblings or parents tended to appropriate the bicycles. But such new options have proven to be relatively effective when they are part of a larger programme to revitalize the whole community, and when they can be sustained and funded, no small task when you consider the vast number of weapons that need to be decommissioned in these conflict zones. The success of these new ideas really depends on the scale of the funding they receive and the consistency and length of donor commitment to sustaining that funding.
The question still stands: how do we effectively separate the guns from the children? The proliferation of small arms has put so many weapons at the disposal of armed groups that trying to stem their flow into any country in turmoil seems impossible. As I mentioned earlier, the production of these light and relatively cheap weapons as well as munitions did not decrease when the Cold War ended. And the Herculean effort on arms-control initiatives in the 1990s, led by countries such as Canada, seems to have lessened, even disappeared, without any outcry from different interested quarters on the international stage, even in normally very responsible capitals.
I think the best way to separate the children from the guns is to bring back a deliberate campaign for the reduction of the proliferation of small arms in illegal trade that goes well beyond the UN Security Council’s action programme in this area, which began in 2001, and the subsequent reports from the secretary general on small arms proliferation and its direct links to conflict and the arming of child soldiers. One of the key problems here is that there has not been a comprehensive study of the subject, which once again seems to highlight the fact that the interests of children are low on the world’s priority list. I was part of the Canadian delegation to the UN General Assembly several years ago as it considered methods of tracing the illegal trading of such weapons. Canada made the argument that small arms were the primary tool used by children and youths in conflicts around the world, putting a face to the subject as well as recommending registering the transit and ownership of these guns, and the destruction of them on the spot if they were found in unauthorized or illegal hands. In 2008 the secretary general’s report finally widened the discussion to include issues of production, marking and tracing. But it is as if the whole exercise has really stood still, as millions of small arms continue to be produced and distributed with near impunity.
If we can revive the campaign against small arms, especially if we stress the link to child soldiers, we can end the overproduction of these weapons and munitions and start eating away at their distribution. The UN Office for Disarmament Affairs would have to be reinforced and would need more depth in the field, perhaps by establishing much more deliberate and innovative approaches through the hundreds of NGOs that could be engaged with the security forces to work with the local actors to create weapons-free zones. For instance, an initiative to create “zones of peace” in the drug wars in Colombia has achieved some success. Communities have taken it on themselves to declare gun- and violence-free zones in the midst of conflict, either literally and geographically, or with ceasefires on holidays. National NGOs have rolled the idea out across the country under the banner of “100 Peace Municipalities.” Such campaigns are certainly worthy of serious re-engagement and p
riority of resources and effort. When one considers the number of people killed, injured and threatened every year, when we speak of “small arms” we are actually speaking of a weapon of mass destruction.
The second D is for demobilization—once again a term that implies a formal process. You have presented yourself to a DDR centre, handed in your weapon (or not) and are now leaving the armed group you were fighting with to enter an interim care centre. But what of the deserters mentioned above, the children who have run away? Those who may not have been released by commanders? What happens to them? Do they still get a chance to take part in educational programmes or vocational training? How do you prove that you were a soldier? Is the burden of proof on the child? It is so important that the personnel who come into contact with these children and youths know how to assess them properly, a difficult task when dealing with kidnapped children or children otherwise forced to flee their homes without a scrap of identification or any belongings. Many also come from countries where they had no access to documentation in the first place; South Africa, for instance, is still coping with providing birth certificates to millions who were disadvantaged by apartheid.
Conflict in imploding nations, which degenerates into civil war, is complex, ambiguous and rife with the unexpected. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to a no-size-fits-anyone problem. Children continue to this day to be somewhat marginalized by DDRR processes. Although UN organizations such as UNICEF and NGOs such as Save the Children are hard at work trying to get children released from armed groups and then rehabilitated, their efforts pale in comparison to the continued efforts of armed groups to increase their ranks by kidnapping and recruiting children.