Complicating an already complex situation is the fact that the accepted UN standards state that 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.” While noble in ambition, the release of children during a conflict presents many challenges for those trying to implement rehabilitation programmes. If they act on this recommendation, children might be released back to their communities while a conflict is still raging and either be kidnapped again or face such hardship that they return to the bush in search of the life they already know and have gotten used to.
Now we come to the many Rs of this process. The UN IDDRS Framework breaks down the reintegration process into two parts, short- and long-term stages. The first, reinsertion, is the assistance given to combatants during the demobilization process, meant to help with the child’s immediate basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter. The second part, reintegration, is meant to be longer term and involves the ex-combatant’s rehabilitation and reintegration into civilian life. The framework states that child-specific reintegration “shall allow a child to access education, a livelihood, life skills and a meaningful role in society. The socio-economic and psychological aspects of reintegration for children are central to global DDR programming and budgeting. Successful reintegration requires long-term funding of child protection agencies and programmes to ensure continuous support for education and training for children, and essential follow-up / monitoring once they return to civilian life.” Successful reintegration ought to drive the overall DDRR process as it is the guarantee that we have been able to bring these children back from the extremes of abuses that they have both committed and survived.
But there have been many failures in this area and the reasons are innumerable, though I believe they all come down to the fact that if there is no acceptance for the ex–child soldier, no forgiveness and, worst of all, no opportunity to build a new life because the political and economic stability of their homeland remains at risk, a smart and capable child or youth will once again seek the opportunities offered by a gun. Where reintegration fails, there is considerable likelihood that former child soldiers will be re-recruited, voluntarily rejoin an armed group, or drift into a life of crime because they have no other means of survival.
Sometimes valid and worthy reintegration programmes for former child combatants fall apart due to erratic funding, irregular resource allocation and general impatience on the part of donors for immediate and measurable results. It’s relatively easy for donors at a remove, no matter how well intentioned, to forget that instant gratification is impossible in this field. After a savage and catastrophic civil war has destroyed basic social order, decades are required to produce a stable citizenry again.
I believe that the key to rebuilding a shattered social order is repairing and restoring the lives of children who have been exploited as soldiers. The destructive impact of their experiences with violence, abuse and exploitation, if not redressed, will continue to ripple out into the wider community. As the American academic and child-protection worker Michael Wessells affirms in his 2007 book, Child Soldiers: From Violence to Protection (based on hundreds of interviews with child combatants):
Children who spend their formative years in combat take on values and identities that are shaped by the military groups to which they belonged. Even at the end of conflict, children who can’t see a future for themselves in their communities and country, may cross borders to fight in neighbouring conflicts. While adults are also available for hire, they can only fight for so long. Children who have grown up having learned fighting as their only means of livelihood and survival are likely to continue fighting for more years than adults. [Emphasis added.]
Child soldiering is a serious threat to regional stability even in the post-conflict nation-building phase. Investments in effective, long-term reintegration programmes are investments in the security and stability of the nation and even the region. Successful reintegration plans must cover all the phases of the conflict, from the beginning of a crisis right through to the conclusion of a peace agreement and well beyond. And they must commit, with depth and sophistication, to the deliberate rehabilitation of conflict-affected children away from evil toward good, from abuse toward restraint, from survival toward living with hope that they can have a better future.
Take the case of a child soldier who has been a leader, who by the age of fourteen has gained extensive experience in command of his peers and even older members of his (or her) group. How do we keep this fourteen-year-old (going on twenty-five) from becoming disenchanted with rehabilitation programmes that offer only short-term schooling and skills training, with the more restrictive “normal” life of his home village, or even worse with the strictures of life in a refugee or internally displaced persons’ camp?
He will soon realize that basic, elementary-level education won’t provide him with the knowledge he needs to maximize his leadership skills to his own and his community’s benefit. Three to six months of schooling with children much younger than himself in a temporary schoolroom set up in a DDRR camp will not persuade him to find the perseverance he needs to get ahead faster than his peers and go on to achieve with his brain and talent rather than with violence. How do we turn these very special children into catalysts of reconciliation and nation building, into the next generation of national leaders working for the democratic good of their fellow citizens? If we don’t harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil. As John Kon Kelei, a former child soldier from the Sudan, says, “Being associated with an armed group made the children hard, your heart had to turn to stone to be able to survive. What I fear most is myself.”
Reintegration is an interesting word in that it presupposes that what existed before the conflict was adequate. It presumes that children are re-entering a previous life, returning home to loving parents and decent economic circumstances. However, in many cases life before conflict was not wonderful, and everyday life presented struggles. So what exactly are children reintegrating into?
How does a shattered community take in children who have been demobilized? How can a community that has not had the time to grieve and come to terms with what has happened, be expected to take in some of the perpetrators of the conflict? Where are these children expected to go? Who is expected to care for them? What protection mechanisms will have been set up to ensure that children are not snatched up to fight again?
If the conflict is ongoing, the social problems that allowed the children to become soldiers in the first place will barely have been addressed. How can we ensure that a child’s rights will be upheld when the very fabric of society is broken beyond belief? These are the difficult questions that must be posed when looking at creating successful and effective DDRR processes. These are the questions we must be asking to ensure that no child be re-subjected to soldiering as an option. Until we face the reality of the situation and ask the right questions, how can anyone come up with the right answers? As P.W. Singer writes in Children at War, “Ultimately, a successful reintegration is as much about whether the families and communities are prepared for acceptance as about whether the children have been properly rehabilitated.” We must find ways to break the re-recruitment cycle—make children and youth not want to go back, not have to go back to life in the bush.
One of the alternatives we can present children with is education. Education is a critical need of the former child soldier, but also a critical element for the prevention of the use of child soldiers. Careful thought must be given to the type of programmes offered. During the CSI’s Ghana simulation exercise in Accra in 2007, several former child soldier participants spoke of their desire to pursue the education they missed because of the time they spent as combatants. The international community and local authorities must carefully consider the type of education to be of
fered. How many times have I heard youths say that the vocational courses that were offered to them in post-conflict settings were inadequate? How many cobblers, bakers and seamstresses does one community need? Are we actually paying attention to the needs of the children and the community or rather training children in short-term programmes that we deem cost-effective? Whose needs are we really trying to fulfill? In his book, A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah mentions the large number of boys who were trained as mechanics in Sierra Leone after the war—how many mechanics does Sierra Leone need for a population that can barely afford cars?
If we truly want to make a dent in the number of children who are re-recruited into gangs or other armed groups in post-conflict settings then we must make sure that the training we are providing is actually filling a need that either already exists or serves to improve the world in which these children live. We must be serious about moulding children and youth into productive individuals who can give back to their communities. In Sierra Leone some programmes have begun to train former child combatants for professions that are desperately needed. Water sanitation experts, agricultural specialists—these are professions that will make their graduates indispensable to their communities. As a result, the youths’ sense of self-worth is improved because they quickly realize they are needed and can be useful to others, and the community may more readily accept children who are actively giving back.
Expecting these youths to take part in traditional paths of education alongside ten-year-olds, after they have commanded groups of their peers and fended for themselves for months and years in the bush, is not productive. How many eighteen-year-olds do you know who want to sit on a school bench reading picture books with prepubescents? This situation only sets the stage for frustration and helps clear the path for re-recruitment. In countries where conflict has occurred, we need pedagogical tools and co-operative institutions that would offer academic programmes with depth and reach, comparable to those available to youths in North America and Europe but adapted to reflect the experiences and expectations of these troubled and challenged former child soldiers.
Increasingly, I believe we must foster the leadership skills and knowledge of these often very experienced young bosses. They are the future of their countries and if we do not harness their potential then we have lost a chance to truly put an end to conflict. As former secretary general of the UN Kofi Annan has said, “Children are our future and if we use them in battle we are destroying the future. We must reclaim them, every one of them, one at a time.”
Maybe we need to fund the creation of academies where such youths could be nurtured—integrated with other war-affected youths from IDP and refugee camps who demonstrate intellectual potential—over three to four years to refocus and get engaged in the rebuilding of their country, becoming examples for the rest of their generation. What a thought—to invest in academic institutions that would garner the vast potential of a society’s young leaders and create the next generation of nation builders. What a challenge—to trust that these youths are not stigmatized for life as damaged goods and that they can become productive human beings. This is a worthy endeavour indeed if we could find the funds and the organizations that would be willing to take on the enormous task of reshaping these veterans from being a source of fear and abusive use of force into becoming the strength and backbone of a new national rebuilding.
Consider what could be done with veteran female child soldiers, who have had the strength to not only survive the usual sexual abuse but have led troops in combat, asserting leadership against all odds and cultural stereotypes. There is a potential here to create educational programmes that help these young women enhance their leadership abilities and figure out how to apply them to civilian life—to break the code that marginalizes women, perhaps even fostering a cadre of young leaders who could help revolutionize the developing world’s approach to governance and peace.
But there is a downside here that cannot be underestimated and needs addressing. These nations, which have been so mired in conflict, also need to invest in themselves, working to create the productive capacity and steady tax base that will sustain them. If far-off donor money is relied on exclusively to retrain these youths into young leaders, we run the risk of distorting development again by footing the bill for something that ends up serving a new elite. This is a trap that could easily scuttle reconciliation initiatives, and even re-create the frictions that started the conflict in the first place. The local community and national government, as fragile as they may be, need to be completely involved in these educational initiatives.
As I mentioned earlier, I currently work with NYPAW. Grace Akallo, one of NYPAW’s founders, said, “If someone had not sent me to school and shown me I am actually capable of doing something good, I wouldn’t be standing here.” John Kon Kelei, who also works with NYPAW, once said something that has stuck in my mind and rises as an answer when anyone accuses me of being unreasonably idealistic: “The reason why we believe that change is possible is not because we are idealists but because we believe we have made it, so other people can make it as well.”
Every child should be allowed the chance to excel. Where you are born should not dictate your potential as a human being. The NYPAW members have managed to succeed despite their difficult beginnings. They have grown up to be productive leaders in their communities and are now helping others who find themselves in the situations they were once in. There are thousands just like them, still living in conflict, just waiting for us to finally get it right and provide the infrastructure they can build upon.
And it is not only the child soldiers we need to think about when it comes to DDRR. The Paris Principles noted the harm caused by focusing reintegration support exclusively on child combatants; other youths and children in need feel envious and abandoned. This tension between focused support for former child soldiers and wider support for all war-affected children, many of whom are discernibly worse off than those who fought, is of concern for those working on this issue. Moreover, attempts solely focused on the individual are doomed to fail since the child is not to blame for what’s happened. It is not as simple as “fixing the children” and putting them into a community. The community also needs “fixing.”
Reintegration is arguably the most important part of the entire process leading to peace, yet it is significantly underfunded. Long-term, flexible funding is often a problem for reintegration programmes, and donor support is sometimes not based on a sound grasp of reality on the ground. DDRR techniques are designed to address specific problems associated with absorbing combatants into civil society and are not, on their own, adequate tools for resolving outstanding conflicts that are fundamentally political and that demand more attention than any DDRR programme can provide.
As I wrote in “Children in Conflict,” my own research at the Carr Center also showed that “later phases of DDRR processes are historically not well supported. It was suggested that this is because few donors are willing or able to sign up to support projects that may go on long after media attention has been drawn elsewhere. Though it may sound overly cynical to put it this way, money follows interest, and interest is largely driven by media attention, which is more easily captured by the drama of conflict than by peace.”
Broadly stated, DDRR can seldom be isolated from the larger issues, often economic, that affect the security and the cohesion of embattled and impoverished states. If we continue to turn a blind eye to what is really needed because donors won’t fund long-term projects or because a “sexier” conflict has turned up in another corner of the world, I am afraid that one day, our luck will run out.
And maybe one way to start thinking about DDRR differently, both as individuals and as donor nations, is to reinforce the UN missions to sustain them, and other UN agencies, through a more deliberate model of integrated NGO and government support. UNICEF coordinated the Sierra Leone DDRR programme with actors from all sorts of disciplines, including the security forces that were
deployed in the country, with some success. Could we simply not formalize these sorts of arrangements, instead of always starting from scratch, recognizing that of course each case will have its own intricacies? It is true that disarmament and demobilization in a conflict zone struggling toward peace are easier done by outside entities, such as neutral peacekeeping missions. But years of work on the issue of reintegration have inexorably led to the realization that without consultation with community members, the process is doomed to fail. The design of the programmes must be the result of careful consideration of the nature of the society and the nature of the conflict. The design of the programmes must also engage all elements of the community, including the children and their families. Their support is critical to long-term success and sustainability.
Ultimately, one of the biggest barriers to successful reintegration programmes is the danger of broken promises. When the gap between words and actions keeps growing, people start to doubt your intentions. When promises of support have been made, it is absolutely critical that they be kept in order to avoid problems associated with mistrust. It is crucial that all parties involved in post-conflict DDRR programmes understand that their primary function is to help foster trust.
Too often, donors, NGOs and especially the media have difficulty committing to the recovery of a conflict zone over the long haul. They are drawn away by the next crisis, taking their funds, their programmes and their cameras with them—and the resulting blow to confidence and progress can be devastating. It is asking a lot from the ever-impatient and results-driven international community to commit for perhaps decades of rebuilding or of creating infrastructure that had never existed, but it is what is required.
Charles Achodo, head of the UN’s DDR programme in Liberia, says that funding often dries up at the reintegration stage of the process. Donors “forget that these people need assistance to become productive members of the community—psychological counseling, trauma healing support, access to employment.” When donors move away to address more pressing crises, as they are doing right now in Sierra Leone, they leave vacuums behind them that nothing can fill, because not much has been securely built. The idea is not to make communities dependent on aid, but self-sustaining—but it takes a long commitment from a lot of partners to help that happen.