A Liberian boy who resists forced recruitment
is told rebels will begin killing a lineup of captured
civilians, one by one, until he agrees to join. After the
fourth killing, he relents. Many children in Liberia and other
countries are fed drugs to make them fight more ferociously,
like Mohammed Sisay, a preteen soldier who became dependent
upon "Bubbles, as his comrades called the amphetamines
fed to them by their grown-up Liberian commanders. "I
began to fight the war. I didn't feel discouraged or afraid.
They made me invisible, he said. At night, they were given
more drugs to make them sleep.
A 10-year-old Sierra Leonean boy abducted by Revolutionary
United Front rebels tries to escape but is caught and punished
by being confined six days in a dungeon-like hole dug into the
ground and covered with metal sheets that turn it into an oven.
Each day brings lashings with a rubber truncheon. Some of his
fellow combatants, like the ones who attacked Abu's parents,
tear through the countryside lopping off hands and arms and
collecting them in sacks to impress their commanders.
Child rebels in April used axes to chop off the
hands of 13-year-old Mariatu Kamara after they kidnaped her and
her 15-year-old sister, Adama, as the girls walked through the
forest. First they hacked off Adama's hands and left her for
dead. Then they carried Mariatu away, promising she would not
be harmed. As soon as some adult rebels left the girl alone
with kid soldiers, though, they decided to chop off her hands,
too.
The sisters survived and today live in a camp
for amputees in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, along with
hundreds of victims of similar atrocities. Many tell similar
nightmarish tales of children who laughed as they chopped off
limbs and claimed to be collecting hands to impress a commander
dubbed "Capt. Blood.
"They were laughing. They were enjoying
it, said 25-year-old Muctarr Braima, whose left arm was
chopped off in January by young rebels carrying a bloody sack
filled with other amputated hands.
Child soldiers are the lost generation of
protracted civil wars, in nations where the three things that
are most plentiful are children, poverty and violence.
Shell-shocked human-rights workers in Colombia joke that in
their Amazonian backwaters, kids leave three prints behind:
their two feet, and the rifle barrel dragging behind them. The
kids tread a career path offering a post in the right-wing
paramilitaries, the left-wing guerrillas, prostitution or
cutting coca to process cocaine.
The use of children who are still developing
their values and personalities to shoot, often to murder, their
fellow human beings violates all the moral taboos of society
and, at least for the younger ones, constitutes a massive
violation of human rights.
As Newsday reporters talked to child soldiers
around the globe and those who worry about them, it became
clear that war itself has become more brutal, unpredictable and
violent because of their more widespread use, because children
are so maleable and easily misled.
"They have no notion of what they're
doing," said the UN's Otunnu. "They're indoctrinated.
They are told do this, and they will do it with ferocity.
While some of these children join armies or
guerrilla groups willingly, their decision often is founded in
such desperation that it represents no choice at all. Many,
many others are systematically kidnaped into war, while the
world stands by watching.
How does a child recover from such horrific
experiences? Experts say most never do, because there are
precious few resources set aside to help them. Not only do
these countries lose an entire generation, but families wind up
torn apart while society at large fears its own
children."There's a value crisis in the society. Sitting
by the fireside is no longer there, said George Omona,
director of a trauma center for child soldiers in Uganda.
"It has brought about a lack of trust in the family.
The United Nations, UNICEF and a slew of
international human-rights groups believe one simple first step
toward improving the situation would be to raise the minimum
age for combat to 18 in the International Convention on the
Rights of the Child. In that treaty and others, the age of
adulthood is defined as 18. That is, for everything but war.
"With the 18-year limit, hopefully we'll
see fewer 13- and 14-year-olds pulled in," said Jo Becker,
head of the Children's Rights section of Human Rights Watch, a
Manhattan-based group spearheading the effort against child
soldiers. "Especially in countries without a lot of
documentation, where a commander can pull in a healthy-looking
13-year-old and pass him off as 15." The last effort to
raise the minimum combat age failed when the treaty was
finalized in 1989, due to protest from an unexpected source.
The United States maintains it must protect its right to
recruit from a pool of high-school graduates or dropouts, even
though they amount to less than 6 percent of any year's batch
of recruits, and less than 1 percent of the active force.
Britain, which allows 16-year-olds into its ranks, also opposes
raising the age limit, but has said it will stand aside to let
the treaty pass, then decide whether to sign it. The United
States won't let the treaty go forward at all.
"We have trouble with the notion of
allowing an international standard to form that we would have
trouble adhering to, said James Schear, an aide to Defense
Secretary William Cohen who is following the issue for the
United States. "Standing aside, as some countries may be
willing to do, would not cut it with us.
That posture angers the developing world, where
most wars are being fought.
"It depresses me when I see countries like
the United States opposing this, said Omona. "These
other countries already have mechanisms in place to protect
their children, but in Africa we have a problem. There is this
will among African leaders to shoot their way into power and to
give guns to children, and there currently is nothing stopping
them from doing that. It would not cost these countries a lot
to raise the age to 18, and I think African children would
greatly benefit from it.
Not only in Africa, but also in Asia, South
America and Europe, it is becoming increasingly hard to
separate civilians from combatants.
In the mindless carnage of World War I,
civilians accounted for 10 percent of total casualties. In the
era of aerial bombardment of cities in World War II, they rose
to 45 percent. Today, in the wars of the developing world,
civilians can comprise as much as 90 percent of wars'
casualties, according to the UN.
"That is prosecuting war for the purpose
of killing civilians, where the very purpose of war is to
annihilate the enemy community, said the UN's Otunnu, a
native of Uganda. "That's what we're witnessing today. If
this was something isolated -- it happens in Rwanda, it happens
in Kosovo and maybe in Afghanistan -- fine. But this is across
the globe. In that context, we're seeing, with barely an
exception, the massive use of children.
Internal wars last longer and gut societies of
any taboos they once may have held, explained Otunnu, who this
past year visited most of the civil-war hot spots, from Sri
Lanka to Colombia to Sierra Leone.
"War is not new to them, but they always
had rules of war," Otunnu said. "The elders will tell
you very clearly, This you do, this you don't do.' That has
gone. It's a kind of ethical vacuum, a free-for-all. It's total
war, in which everything goes. With adults dying or dropping
out, children fill the vacuum for leaders who increasingly seek
total control, Otunnu said. Forty-two percent of the population
in the developing world, on average, is under 18.It is about a
quarter of the population in the developed world.
So children become the most available and willing recruits,
he said.
To be sure, children and war have intermingled
in the past. During the Middle Ages, thousands were sent off
from Europe to martyr themselves in the Children's Crusade.
British soldiers as young as 16 died in the Falklands and
Persian Gulf Wars, according to Human Rights Watch. But never
were children so widely exposed as they are now, human-rights
officials warn.
"Certainly, youths have been involved [in
war], but not at the same level or in the same extreme
measures, said Becker, of Human Rights Watch. "We are
seeing kids today being used on suicide missions, being pushed
to the front or even being used as human mine detectors.
Jean-Claude LeGrand, the head of
child-protection programs for UNICEF in New York, says history
is no excuse. "I am always a bit concerned about comparing
too much the fact that there have always been children used as
soldiers in history, because this would miss the point, he
said. "The point is that there is a systematic use of
children for the last 10 years, not for the last 20,000 years.
For the last 10 years what has occurred is the systematic use
of children on a very large scale.
And it's developing very, very fast.
Technology has helped make child soldiering
feasible. Children are fighting with arms that are increasingly
easy to carry and toy-like in their simplicity. The M-16, the
AK-47, the AR-15 and the ArmaLite rifle, weapons of choice for
rebel groups and regular armies alike, weigh about 8 pounds.
With a light squeeze of the trigger, they fire a burst of
bullets that travel at more than 900 yards per second and can
punch a fist-sized hole in human flesh. For many of these
children, their elders say, that squeeze of the trigger is
their first sensation of power, identity and belonging.
In Sierra Leone, where, until a recent peace
agreement, children were ordered to lop off the heads and limbs
of civilians, child soldiering dates to colonial times. As the
British army began withdrawing in preparation for the country's
independence in 1961, it began searching for suitable recruits
to build a new, post-independence army for Sierra Leone.
"They started with men, but they were not educated
enough, recalls
Momodu B. Jawara, the commander of the Kamajor
camp in Kenema and a former child soldier himself. "Then
they started looking at new secondary school graduates, but
that took too long. So they started looking for kids in
school.
Jawara, recruited at age 14, was one of those
kids. Unlike in his day, though, when children were molded by
military officers into disciplined soldiers, the child soldiers
of today are primarily members of rebel groups whose main
skills are killing and looting, not defending their countries
against foreign invaders. The UN's Otunnu said the Kamajors, a
civil-defense unit that evolved from an elite brand of
hunter-warriors, fall into that category, though they support
the current government of Sierra Leone.
"The Kamajors, they had a traditional
system for training adults, to learn how to hunt, to assume
responsibility, Otunnu said. "It was twisted in the
context of this war to become a channel through which you get
young fighters. It's no longer to go through an elaborate
training program. Just round them up, indoctrinate them and
give them a gun. That was an offshoot of something traditional,
which had a positive purpose. It was orderly, it was very
systematic, and then it was distorted into this.
Jawara's trainees undergo a secret initiation
and immunization -- which neither he nor his followers would
describe but which is rumored to include the eating of human
flesh -- that they claim makes them bulletproof. Their
trademark is a lion's tooth hanging from a black cord around
the neck.
Children Associated With War, which tries to
rehabilitate former child soldiers in Sierra Leone, estimates
about 10,000 kids under 18 -- many under 15 -- are involved in
combat in the country, where a civil war has raged since 1991.
Though a truce was signed in July, peace is far from
guaranteed, and the young combatants remain armed to the teeth
and on a war footing. Theirs is a land of teenyboppers with
guns who listen to rap music and wear Tupac Shakur muscle
shirts, imitation Ray-Bans, counterfeit Nikes, and AK-47s slung
across their bony chests.
Here, at least, the campaign against child
soldiering is being heard, though not necessarily heeded.
Jawara insists no one younger than 18 is accepted into Kamajor
training. Having been a 14-year-old recruit himself and having
made a career of the military, however, he says child
soldiering is good if discipline and training go with it. Why,
then, doesn't he drop his age limit? "Because you people
don't allow it! he says with a laugh, referring to the
international condemnation of child soldiering. "I've been
scared of you guys. One day you might just bump into us and
say, Let me see your Kamajors.' So I have to make sure
they're all old enough.
Still, it's clear they're not. It's hard to
keep a straight face as one Kamajor after another steps
forward, shyly extends a skinny arm in greeting, and states in
an unbroken voice an age that appears to be exaggerated by at
least a decade. Musa Kallon, about 5 feet tall and no more than
80 pounds, insists he is 25 but looks 15 at most. "I've
come to fight and train for my country, he says, holding up
a rifle as his fishnet camouflage tank top hangs on him like a
potato sack.
A boy in fuzzy pink pajamas who looks about 15
bounds forward and offers his age as 22. A tiny boy claims to
be 19. Jawara jumps in and says the boy is only 9 and not a
Kamajor but a kitchen helper. When Jawara is not listening,
though, the boy insists he has undergone Kamajor training.
Later, as more and more self-proclaimed
20-somethings begin running forward and clowning childishly for
the visitors, the camp's adult commanders get edgy. One grabs a
stick and chases the group -- including the boy in the
bunny-like pink pajamas and another toting a rifle and wearing
a goofy Cat-in-the-Hat style top hat -- into the kitchen and
orders them to stay there.
Later, under Jawara's watchful eye, three lines
of about 200 trainees march back and forth under the barking
orders of a commander. Little Abu, who has graduated from
military training, uses a stick taller than himself to lash at
those who don't keep up with the drill, which is performed
under a broiling sun. Like Abu, these trainees will be taught
how to use and care for a variety of weapons, how to dig
trenches, how to swing across a rope suspended between two
trees, how to find their way through the dense forest and how
to sustain themselves for days in the wilderness. It's like an
African version of the Outward Bound survival course, except
that most of these boys have seen combat and are doing this to
hone their survival skills and obtain the laminated card that
identifies them as full-fledged Kamajors.
These boys at least are volunteers, basking in
the glory of being part of a group that still has an elite
reputation for its fighting skills and willingness to confront
the notorious rebels. But many Sierra Leonean rebels are
children abducted by the fighters and literally branded by
having their skin sliced with razor blades.
"They're the worst," militia
commander Jawara said of his adversaries in the Revolutionary
United Front. "They have no consciences. They kill; they
don't feel anything. They're the most wicked of the lot. This
cutting of hands is done by children. The burning of houses --
they use the children to do that.
James Thorpe was 10 when he was abducted by the
rebels and forced to pick up a gun and fight with them. His
captivity lasted six years and included being drugged with
gunpowder to make him hyper and agitated -- more willing to
kill and fight on the front lines. "We were almost always
hungry. When there was food, we would be called to stand in
line and hold our hands out, he says, explaining that there
were no bowls or eating utensils. The gunpowder was mixed into
the food to ensure it was ingested by the famished boys.
Like most former child soldiers, who are
fearful of retribution and tortured by the things they have
seen and done, James denies ever intentionally killing anyone
during his fighting days, though he admits the bullets he fired
might have hit someone. It is only after months of in-depth
counseling -- a luxury unheard of in most developing countries
-- that youngsters start to admit to what they have done, say
adults who work with such children. But getting them to confess
is crucial to relieving their guilt, say counselors, whose job
is to make the children see that their horrible deeds were
forced upon them by adults and that they should not be burdened
by guilt.
For both former abductees and willing recruits
whose hands are accustomed to little more than guns, the end of
the wars leaves their prospects truncated. With its war over
for two years, Liberia's estimated 4,300 child soldiers have
exchanged their weapons for sacks of rice, a change of clothes
and the equivalent of $5. But few have gone back to the few
schools that remain open. Most ex-soldiers, wherever they are,
are too embarrassed to sit in classrooms surrounded by children
years their junior. What's left to most of them is an itinerant
life on the street, where begging and stealing offer more
immediate rewards than lean years spent in a classroom or
vocational school. And many have been horribly maimed or
disfigured by their battles, left by their rebel heroes to
languish or die.
Perhaps worse is the change in attitudes toward
children in countries that have been brutalized by them. No
longer can a hungry, homeless child wander into a village and
expect help, said Theo Momoh of Children Associated With War.
"Now, people are a bit skeptical, he said. "How
can they be so open? They think maybe this child could be a
spy. In the beginning of the war we saw children as innocents,
but during the war we came to see how they were being used, and
that's when the doubts came.
Meanwhile, besieged governments around the world choose
defense spending over more social programs that could help
ex-soldiers.
"With this will in Africa, with leaders shooting their
way into power and putting children at war, I don't know what
kind of Africa we'll have in the future, said Omona, at the
trauma center in Uganda.
"I think for the sake of children in Africa, the world
should do more.
And more for all the children of the world whose tender
years were brutalized by performing the arts of war.
"These guys are loose cannons in a way. They're so used
to being on their own, that they're basically just little,
early adults, said Elke Wisch, a child-development expert
with UNICEF. "If they don't want to go home at night, they
don't go home. You basically have a lost generation out there
now.