Source: Sunday Herald
Publication date: 2003-09-14

SPECIAL REPORT Foreign Editor David Pratt has met child soldiers on front lines around the world and was shocked by their stories. Here he recounts their experiences and asks what can be done to save them

Their masters have many uses for boys like Jacuba, Amir, and J- Boy. At any one time they might become human minesweepers, spies, sex slaves, suicide bombers, or just plain torturers, rapists and killers. The three boys are part of a brutalised lost generation for whom the front line is their only world. Among the countless child soldiers I have encountered over the years, the tale of these three youngsters' lives is all too common. For no particular reason, their individual stories have lodged in my memory.

First, there was Jacuba Kondeh, a 10-year-old with the eyes of an adult and his own 1000-yard stare. "Since we got him back he fights all the time with everyone, nothing frightens him, and sometimes I wonder if he is still my son," his mother Aminata Kondeh told me tearfully one morning in a muddy refugee camp in Sierra Leone Getting to his feet, little Jacuba showed me the drill he had been made to perform twice daily with other boys during the year he spent with rebel fighters in the West African bush.

Marching stiffly across the room, he performed a perfect about- turn before slapping his tiny sandalled foot on the clay floor and saluting.

Nothing about it resembled a game. It was the traumatised actions of a little boy indoctrinated through fear and violence. A child so dehumanised he had thought nothing of killing men, women and children, before cutting out their hearts or livers and eating them.

Then there was 13-year-old Amir in his filthy black sweatshirt with "Hoochie Coochie Baby" emblazoned on it. He was a good natured boy who served me tea from a plastic Thermos while never letting go of his Kalashnikov assault rifle.

When asked about his sweater, Amir's face always lit up. He said he knew nothing of the places - Hollywood, Paris, Rome - whose names adorned its motif. Only that his father brought it back for him from neighbouring Pakistan, before he was killed by a shell explosion. Since then Amir had been a holy warrior, a "mujahed", he told me, who supported his mother and two sisters by fighting in the streets of the then devastated Afghan capital, Kabul.

J-Boy was the most recent encounter I've had with those of the lost generation. A little over two weeks ago, I met the 14-year-old on the Po river bridge on Liberia's front line. "My big brother was a soldier man but he na (not) died. My brother told me to fight because when you soldier you can get money and loot," J-Boy said in broken Creole, when asked why he had joined the LURD rebels.

Children have been at the forefront of fighting in Liberia ever since former President Charles Taylor fought his way to power during the country's first civil war in the early 1990s. His National Patriotic Front of Liberia movement grouped its child soldiers in a special Small Boys Unit.

Had J-Boy himself killed anyone, I enquired?

"Oh sure man, plenty, plenty with this good AK," he told me, patting the AK-47 assault rifle cradled in his lap.

J-Boy's gun was much like 35 million other Kalashnikov rifles in circulation around the world. For all its deadliness, it is an oddly toy-like weapon. Brute simple, with only nine moving parts, it weighs just 10.5lbs. Yet it can empty a 30-round magazine in three seconds, and is powerful enough to punch holes through a man's chest from 1000 yards away. Ideal for J-Boy and countless other child soldiers. Its ammunition has another attraction. The cartridge once prised opened and its contents emptied out, provides a powder which when mixed with marijuana gives a "special high".

In Liberia's conflict, as in others where children are used in battle, there are clusters of kids cranked up on this marijuana cocktail as well as methamphetamines and palm wine.

Deranged by such drug abuse and, with the complete breakdown of any social order, the children are often "initiated" into combat by having to witness or commit terrible acts such as killing their own parents In some instances, for example, in northern Uganda, the Lord's Resistance Army actually forced children to kill some of their relatives to make sure that they don't go back and that their "loyalty" is total.

After recruitment and encouragement by their adult overseers, it is they, not adults, who then often wield the power that decides life and death. A power that frequently spawns in them the capacity for almost limitless cruelty.

In recent weeks, across Liberia's streets and villages, a frenzied army of juvenile sadists often wearing a surreal array of fetishes and accessories, such as women's wigs, headphones, shower caps and teddy bear backpacks, shot and hacked to pieces whoever got in their way.

One militia commander in Liberia confided privately that children made the "best and bravest" soldiers on the front line. "Don't overlook them. They can fight more than we, the big people It's hard for them to just retreat," he insisted.

Not surprisingly, Nils Kastberg, director of emergency programmes at the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, sees the child warriors prowess in a different light. "Children haven't had a chance to develop a value system. They have no parameters. They are totally unpredictable," he said.

I remember how evidence of that unpredictability, and the brutalising process that it came from, was revealed in page after page of the log book registering details of other former child soldiers such as little Jacuba Kondeh, at the "Approve School Camp" outside Freetown in Sierra Leone:

Name: Issatu C. Age: 15. Education: None.

Abducted by rebels in Kolo January, 1999. Suffered sexual abuse - raped by one man. Exposed to cocaine, marijuana, pega, (gin) and "Blue Boats" (amphetamine).

Trained as gunner and took part in four offensives. Has seen many people killed and mutilated with machetes and hearts, livers, flesh, used for human food.

Entry after entry read like a litany of horrors, bringing home the scale and numbers of children involved in this one small African country alone. It is estimated that there are more than 300,000 child combatants actively fighting in over two dozen countries around the world at any one time. African and Asian countries are notably culpable including: Liberia, Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka, as well as strife-torn South American countries including Colombia and Paraguay.

In recent years, the exploitation of child soldiers has known no bounds. In Burma for example, the army has recruited street children as young as 10 for use as human minesweepers.

In Ethiopia, government forces press-ganged thousands of secondary school students and used them in human wave attacks across minefields in the border war with Eritrea.

Across Iraq, thousands of children under 15 joined the Saddam Lion Cubs, learning how to use small arms and engage in hand-to- hand combat.

In Sri Lanka, young Tamil girls hailed as "Birds of Freedom" by that country's Tamil insurgency, were trained as suicide bombers.

Burma's appalling record is especially worth noting, says Victoria Forbes Adams, programme officer for the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

"Perhaps as many as 70,000 children are soldiers there, the largest number of any official state or government run national army," she explained.

The dramatic increase in the number of civil conflicts since the end of the Cold War has prompted the greater use of child soldiers, in part because factions tend to rely on large numbers for success. Also, as these conflicts drag on, they deplete the pool of adult men, so children are used to replace them, according to Forbes Adams.

A newly released Amnesty International report, titled Democratic Republic of Congo: Children at War, reveals a current point in case. Warring militias in the region, far from honouring promises to stop recruiting child soldiers to fight for them, have been actively pulling more into their fold.

Amnesty says that groups, including the national army, have forced child soldiers to kill, rape and engage in cannibalism and sex acts with corpses.

"We were told to kill people by forcing them to stay in their homes while we burned them down, we even had to bury some alive," says 15-year-old Kalami, who served as a soldier for six years.

"One day, my friends and I were forced by our commanders to kill a family, to cut up their bodies and to eat them my life is lost, I have nothing to live for. At night, I can no longer sleep," he says.

Some of the children forcefully recruited into the fighting groups were abducted in the streets or taken from classrooms and refugee camps.

Many cannot return home now because of the atrocities they were forced to become involved in.

"I was looked upon badly by the population when I killed people I was nicknamed The Assassin and the name became known," says 16- year-old Albert. "People started to say that The Assassin has left the army and so now we are going to make him pay it would be suicide for me to dare to go back there. They would kill me," he adds.

If boy soldiers are the cheapest and most readily brutalised participants in modern warfare, girls are even more vulnerable. While sometimes forced to fight, more often they are pressed into service as domestic servants or "wives" to provide sex on demand.

"I thought that if I joined the army I would be protected. One day a commander wanted me to become his wife, so I tried to escape," said 16-year-old Natalia, from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"They caught me, whipped me and raped me every night for many days. When I was just 14, I had a baby. I do not even know who his father is."

Miatta, another Liberian war orphan who carries a gun, said all girl fighters were subject to orders from their male colleagues.

"Anything the commander says you must do it without delay," she said. "After fire-fire (fighting) the chief supposed to relax and eat something."

In societies with limited electricity, running water and few roads, where schools - like those I saw across Liberia - lie looted or half charred, what else is there for these young whose lives are dislocated or abandoned by war?

Picking up an AK-47 rifle and lurching off to the front line in a battered pick-up truck is all too often the only way to fill one's belly. Faced with the harshest of realities, most make money any way they can.

"I can be a holy warrior or I can do that," said Amir, the young Afghan I met during that country's civil war a few years ago, pointing to some other boys following cows with upturned palms to catch excrement to sell as fuel in the bitter Afghan winter.

Nearby the bodies of other boy soldiers lay spread-eagled on the snow face-up, their eyes pecked out by birds. What choices were there left in Amir's life one can only ask?

"These children are victims," says Unicef's Kastberg. "The greatest crime is committed by the adults who allowed this to happen."

If that is undoubtedly the case, what then is being done to tackle those who perpetrate the use of child soldiers?

In November, 2001, UN Security Council Resolution 1379 was adopted which, among its many points, expressed, "its determination to give the fullest attention to the question of the protection of children in armed conflict".

Last year the United Nations general assembly adopted a new international protocol banning the use of soldiers under 18, a treaty that represented a significant advance in the protection of children's rights.

But while a consensus against the use of child soldiers exists, the political will of the world community to take effective action to enforce legislation remains in question.

"The feeling is that these international standards and norms were introduced but not adhered to," says Victoria Forbes Adam, of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

Along with human rights group Amnesty International, the Coalition wants those involved in the recruitment of child soldiers to be investigated and prosecuted.

"Communities needed to learn that the practice is a crime, while the world needs to raise the sceptre of criminal justice by putting warlords on trial," the organisation insists.

From Uganda to Colombia, Sudan to the Congo, war has given a grim new meaning to youth opportunities.

Aid agencies inevitably find that they are left to pick up the pieces once the fighting has stopped.

Napoleon Abdulai, of the UN Programme for the Co-ordination of Assistance for Security, has warned that many programmes undertaken so far to disarm and demobilise child fighters and reintegrate them into civilian life have been "badly managed".

In peace negotiations and agreements, the UN has recognised the importance of disarming child soldiers and helping them return to mainstream society.

But greater resources are needed to provide treatment to heal the long-term psychological traumas endured by children who witness and participate in atrocities.

All too often, he said, not enough was done to secure decent jobs for the former combatants once they had been disarmed and retrained, so they just drifted back into warfare.

Beyond a serious intervention to rebuild the education system, what most of the children in these societies need is a corps of psychiatrists or counsellors to help them recover from the trauma of war and get reoriented.

"You disarm people, put them in school, you train them, give them vocational training allow them to be positive contributors to society. You don't just disarm them," was how one aid worker put it.

In the absence of good alternatives and lacking other experience, many child soldiers simply form criminal gangs and mercenary groups following their elders from one regional conflict to another.

Over the next few months, the UN Security Council will once again meet to discuss and take stock of the continuing use by some countries of their young as cannon fodder.

Unless the international body takes a much tougher line, its deliberations are unlikely to weigh heavily on the minds of those who recruit youngsters to their bloody ranks.

Whatever the outcome, it will come too late to help Jacuba, Amir and J-Boy, a generation lost to the gun.