In a case study on the reconstruction of Sierra Leone, posted on the University of Colorado’s conflict resolution information site, www.beyondintractability.org, in March 2008, Christi F. Freeman writes,
The failure of the donor community to provide sufficient infrastructure reconstruction and employment generation has made livelihoods in agriculture for ex-combatants and youth untenable … Opportunities in the agricultural sector have been further stifled by international insistence on removing trade barriers, which has allowed cheaper Asian rice to swamp the local market, reducing the ability of small farmers to compete. A combination of the misguided reintegration programmes and the demands of international financial institutions have resulted in a lack of infrastructure and access to productive lands, a lack of appropriate training, and increased disappointment among youth.
Many children in conflict zones actually understand how to manipulate the system. Linda Dale, who works for Children/Youth as Peacebuilders, points to youth in northern Uganda figuring out how to get their school fees paid for twice and to children who never fought pretending to be child soldiers in order to access assistance. In Sierra Leone, schools actually receive goods or materials for integrating former child soldiers into the classroom, which is one of the good things happening in that country: if benefits flow to the community as well as to the individual child, it helps to de-stigmatize the children.
The largest truth here, which I’ve stressed a number of times so far, is that simple, technical solutions are rarely enough, and reintegration requires long-term commitment from donors and foreign agencies, yes, but also total dedication on the part of community and nation.
As terrible as the experiences of all child soldiers are, there is additional discrimination within that wider category. Roughly 40 per cent of child soldiers are girls, but their unique needs are often not taken into account by those attempting to address the issue of child combatants. One of the key failures of DDR and child-protection programmes has been the inability to adequately address the gender dimensions of child soldiering. Advocacy efforts have also failed to erase the idea that child soldiers are only male. Girls have gendered war experiences and specific reintegration needs.
Young girls who have been raped and borne children in inhospitable and unsanitary conditions have often suffered irreparable physical damage to their immature bodies, but they also suffer the cultural vulnerability of rejection by their society because of what has happened to them, even though it was not of their making. How do we break that code of silence, guilt and shame that they carry—often in their arms through their unwanted infants—and permit them a modicum of social acceptability and a future as caring and loving mothers?
DDRR programmes for girls require effort, resources and cultural adjustments that are rarely required to ensure the boys’ return to the fold. The cultural fabric of many societies in Africa, in particular, is male dominated. When conflict erases or disrupts the cultural mores, as it has done so heartbreakingly in the Great Lakes Region, young men are actually rewarded by their commanders for their transgressions against women. One innovative suggestion might be to target young men and families with programmes aimed at erasing the stigma currently attached to girl combatants and to women and girls who have been sexually violated.
Since girl soldiers are not as visible as boy soldiers, and are less understood, they are often marginalized from the DDRR process. Despite being perceived as passive actors in conflict, girl soldiers can be highly active combatants during war. Conflict situations often allow girls to be taken out of their traditional roles and put in positions of power, independence and responsibility. The qualities they develop when forced to assume such roles do not simply go away when they are demobilized.
At the reintegration stage of the DDRR process many girls might be reluctant to go back to traditional female roles that they had willingly left behind. Often, due to their experiences girls can develop survival mechanisms that make them more aggressive and combative. They sometimes engage in behaviour that might not be seen as culturally or socially appropriate for a woman, such as cursing, drug abuse or promiscuity, and that further isolates them from everyday life in their home communities. They must have a say in what is best for them and their dependants. As Susan McKay wrote in “Reconstructing Fragile Lives: Girls’ Social Reintegration in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone,” an article published in the journal Gender and Development in November 2004, “While girl combatants may have been equals as comrades in armed groups, many occupational paths are denied to them as girls during peace times.” And sexually abused girls, who have become mothers of unwanted babies, find no accepted routes to rebuilding a life within the normal social structure. If they are not supported by long-term and innovative reintegration methods—for instance, teaching them non-traditional skills, such as carpentry, plumbing and small-scale financial management, that allow them to overturn old perceptions of what a woman’s role should be—they and any children they may have been left to raise are often ostracized.
The stigma raped girls face is enormous. Due to the fear of being identified and prosecuted or stigmatized, many girls simply self-demobilize. Girls often re-enter their home communities or the camps under the radar, trying not to draw attention to their association with armed groups, but they often find it difficult to bond again with members of the community and end up living on the outskirts of society. Pregnant girls and those with children are often unable to attend school or skills training. Not only does the mere presence of an infant or toddler draw attention and questions they do not wish to confront, but school often costs money they do not have.
Increasingly, rape and sexual violence are used as a weapon in today’s wars. Not only is sexual violence inflicted on villagers but very often within the ranks of armed groups themselves. Young girls in such conflict zones become victims of two dehumanizing tragedies: being forced into the life of a child soldier and horrific sexual violence such as rape. Although boys can also be the targets of sexual violence, they will not face the same stigma. The reintegration process for a boy will be very different. He can earn his keep and prove himself through work and his newly acquired skills. A girl, however, has lost her purpose at the heart of the community. She no longer has the same marriage value and her children are considered non-persons. An ex–girl soldier knows that if and when she returns to her village she will be seen as a disgrace to her family and her community, even if she wasn’t to blame for what happened to her. In one blow, an ex–girl soldier has lost her innocence and the spontaneity of love. Her right to intimacy has been stolen from her.
Physically, her health is also at risk. She has often been battered and has contracted sexually transmitted illnesses such as hepatitis and HIV/AIDS. Because of the conditions under which she was forced to give birth, she may be afflicted with fistula, more common than anyone wants to imagine. The damage to her body can be so grave that a young girl may never be able to bear children again. She may suffer, along with her male counterparts, from malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition.
Emotionally, she must deal with the memory of what has happened to her and her peers, the destruction of her self-esteem, and psychological trauma. She is shunned by others, laughed at and cast out by children who may not have been involved in the conflict. She is often disowned by her family. These aspects are not usually dealt with in the DDRR process.
And what of her children, if she has them, who were born in the bush, fathered by rebel leaders or as a result of multiple rapes? Young girls struggle to love these unwanted children. Some latch on to them as the only beings who will love them unconditionally, and others hate them for being a constant reminder of how they came to be. In the wider community, “rebel babies” carry a huge stigma, and will never be accepted, whereas within the armed groups themselves they are granted an elevated status. A young mother who loves her child may feel her child’s future is brighter if she stays where she is, rather than trying to go home.
All of these physical and emotional traumas are compounded by the fact that in the usual DDRR programmes, girls are relegated to vocational training in traditionally female skills such as cooking and sewing, which render them essentially powerless once they return home, regardless of the positions they may have held in the bush. Girls actually help to sustain armed groups, almost literally—Joseph Kony is reported to have fathered at least 200 children. The NYPAW round table in Halifax last year reinforced the message that without girl soldiers most armed groups would fall apart.
Yet DDRR was created as a male concept. Men were and continue to be the perpetrators of war, and girls and young women are forced or coerced into joining them. Simply adding a gender component to DDRR will not address a girl’s needs properly since the entire framework was built for adult males. A parallel framework needs to be created to address girls’ specific needs.
Boys, too, pose health challenges that DDRR programmes are forced to deal with. Alcohol and drug addiction cross the gender divide. Heroin, marijuana and cocaine mixed with gunpowder dull these children’s pain and hop them up for combat. Singer reports in Children at War that, at the end of the conflict in Sierra Leone, more than 80 per cent of the RUF fighters had used either heroin or cocaine.
Due to group sexual activities, sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV/AIDS, are common among child soldiers too. While there are no formal statistics on HIV/AIDS rates in child soldiers, the UN has recognized the prevalence of the disease in former combatants in that it provides, according to the IDDRS Framework website, “policy makers, operational planners and DDR officers with guidance on how to plan and implement HIV/AIDS programmes as part of a DDR framework.” Also, there is this passage on the website of the UN special representative on children and armed conflict:
There is a correlation between the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) and sexual violence and the exploitation of girls and women in corridors of wars. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimates that rates of HIV among combatants are three to four times higher than those among local populations. When rape is used as a weapon of war, the consequences for girls and women are often deadly. Armed conflict also exacerbates other conditions in which HIV/AIDS thrives, such as extreme poverty, displacement and separation. Programmes for HIV/AIDS awareness, care and support in both peace operations and humanitarian programmes should be continued and strengthened.
This passage is in equal parts awful and self-evident.
Where do the ideas of accountability and justice sit in this realm of DDRR? I’ve mentioned that former child soldiers can be summarily executed for their crimes or sent to jail—never given a chance to reclaim their stolen childhoods.
Often, as part of reintegration, the ex–child soldiers—or at least the boys—go through forgiveness ceremonies where the community accepts them back. But what seems to be lacking is the opportunity for the children to forgive the community for having let them down and allowed the situation to progress to a point where fighting was inevitable. Forgiveness is not always one-sided, and there are issues of justice and redress on both sides of a conflict in which children have become combatants. Such serious societal issues of justice need to be addressed before a child can be successfully reintegrated.
Some countries create their own military tribunals, which can be biased against former child soldiers. But if a country does not have a proper government, judicial process, police system or security sector, how can we really expect its court systems to conduct fair trials? Rwanda and the Congo are two examples where military tribunals have scapegoated children in the process of assigning blame in the post-conflict reconstruction timeframe. Volunteer participation in the Interahamwe before the genocide automatically made Rwandan youth guilty of genocide, and huge numbers of them were arrested and sent to jail. However, with time, clearer heads prevailed and the Rwandan government instituted a policy that no one who had been under fourteen at the time would be held responsible for their actions. The government also reinvented a traditional justice ritual called Gacaca in which the accused and his victims were called to testify without lawyers in front of elders, which led to public apologies from the perpetrators, and forgiveness and reintegration into the community for many youths. Those accused of rape, however, remained incarcerated and were processed through the national judicial system (which banned capital punishment several years ago).
Sierra Leone turned to a special court, which was given jurisdiction over offenders eighteen years and younger, so that the people wouldn’t seek vigilante justice for ex–child soldiers, but as I mentioned earlier, its special prosecutor, David Crane, refused to charge juvenile offenders, arguing that an injustice had been committed against them.
On occasion the community does take justice into its own hands, and when kids return to their villages they are physically abused, which might offer the villagers retribution for the pain inflicted by the child when he or she was fighting, but provides neither real justice nor a way for that child to come back to the fold.
And this is the final tipping point in the struggle to provide both justice and accountability for the wider community and healing for the children: how will these children come forward to register for DDRR if they know they face retribution at the hands of their family and neighbours or criminal prosecution or both? Would children with the capacity and the weapons to keep on fighting believe that it is better for them to lay down the gun?
Getting the word out about DDRR programmes is already a difficult task. If we condone the prosecution of children, we may have an even more difficult time persuading ex–child soldiers to come in from the cold. And at this point I can’t help but comment on the stance the government of Canada has taken on a young man and Canadian citizen, who by every definition must be considered a child soldier. Canada—one of the drafters and first signatories of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, an instrument to protect such children from prosecution and a guarantee that they should be put through a formal process of DDRR—has kept Omar Khadr in the illegal jail at Guantanamo for more than seven years without lifting a finger to repatriate him. And as this book goes to press Khadr is standing trial before a military tribunal at Guantanamo. The Canadian government insists it has confidence in the U.S. justice system and clings to the fact that though Canada has ratified the convention, we have not yet implemented it by legislation. (I will be introducing legislation in the Senate just after this book goes to press to rectify this loophole.) The Khadr case is a black mark on my own country’s international reputation and standing in the fight for child rights and human rights as a whole.
Too few ex–child soldiers actually break out of the evil milieu in which they’ve existed for months and years, and even fewer actually thrive as they diligently, bravely and with a bit of luck, try to take advantage of any opportunity to succeed as a normal member of society. Many destroy themselves through crime, drug abuse or sickness, or because they have been abandoned. Others survive from day to day with no future and as such join the hopeless. A very few, again through luck combined with bravery and grit—and the generous efforts of foreign friends—escape from the region completely and build a new life from scratch in a new place, displaying extraordinary resilience.
But what of the child soldiers who paid the ultimate price? What can we say about those whose bones are spun across the landscape of these nation states at war or in civil conflict? We know so little of them. We don’t even have decent statistics on where and when they fell to bullets, machetes, land mines and grenades in multitudes of ambushes, attacks, patrols and undercover insertions, or in the mining of gold and diamonds for the sustainment of their adult leaders’ cause.
Who cries for them? Who accounts for their loss to humanity? In the scheme of important things to resolve when stopping conflict, who has stopped to weep over their unmarked places of death, the blood-soaked ground where t
hey were abandoned by their “warrior” ethic, failed by their fighting machine, lost their drug-induced fearsome-killer mantra, and died—lonely, heartbroken children sacrificed to the evil ends of adults? Who actually sings their songs of sadness and promises, “We shall never forget”?
Probably no one.
8.
THE MOMENT: KILLING A CHILD SOLDIER
THERE ARE MOMENTS when time actually stops dead in its tracks. The moment becomes an eternity. The moment lives in your being from that point on, even when clock time starts up again.
The blue-helmeted peacekeeper who shot and killed the child soldier at the end of chapter four would have been dumped into such an endless moment. The account that follows is my best attempt at feeling, seeing and hearing what such a moment would bring that soldier, who is fictionalized here but is also as real as my intuition and military experience can make him. The violence committed against the world of a child when he or she is forced to pick up a gun is extreme, but at least most of us know in our bones that such a transgression is wrong. But our peacekeepers, facing child soldiers in the field, are told that they just need to do their jobs, trust their training, keep their focus on the mission and apply the rules of engagement. That doesn’t seem to me to be all we need to tell them.
Facing a child combatant in battle strains to the limits the parameters we set for our soldiers. Often idealistic, our peacekeepers and peacemakers believe that they will use their training, their power, their expertise and their weapons to protect life, not take it. During training we teach our maturing recruits how to trespass against the instinct to protect life in order to do just that: protect life, home, country and the vulnerable in foreign lands. It’s a powerful contradiction, drilled into the nerves and reactions of a soldier.