Child soldiers: targets of war

Rehabilitation programme

Sawaneh was kidnapped from his village in 1997, when he was 10, and forced to fight for rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.). In January 2000, under pressure from U.N. peacekeepers and lobbying by church groups, he and other child combatants were turned over to Caritas Makeni, a local Catholic aid agency supported by the international Caritas network. After the peace process broke down four months later, he was among 200 children who fled to the capital, Freetown, to avoid being recruited again. There he began a rehabilitation programme. Removing the gun from me was a vital step, said Sawaneh. The programme helped me feel natural and normal again. It helped me develop ways to fit back into society.
Yet, Sawaneh spoke of the legacy of his past. He described rejection by many schoolmates, community members and even his family. Do not bring your rebel life here they told him. Everyday, he felt haunted by the wrongdoing that he was forced to commit. The road has not been easy, said Sawaneh. In school I suffered resentment from other school children. They looked at me differently, like an evil person. Maybe they had good reasons. After all, we used to do very horrible things to them, their families, and friends. He now lives in foster care, but hopes to one day reunite with his family. We want to be able to visit our friends and families everywhere in the country without fear of abduction, recruitment and other dangers, he told the Security Council.

Civil war

Sierra Leone’s R.U.F. rebels, led by Foday Sankoh, launched their campaign against government forces in March 1991. They decapitated community leaders and put their heads on stakes. The army doubled in size to counter the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.)threat, drawing conscripts from urban ghettoes, but could not supply or pay the men. Discipline disintegrated, and children, who were more easily controlled, were drawn in. By 1994, as the countryside collapsed into banditry, communities were being attacked by violent youths who were either R.U.F., or renegade soldiers. The country’s diamond-producing areas were overrun by R.U.F. and soldiers, who used children as slave labour. In the ensuing four years, several military coups took place and the distinction between the army and rebels virtually disappeared. Horrendous atrocities against civilians continued.
In July 1999, a peace agreement was signed to try to put an end to the civil war, which had claimed over 100,000 lives, with a further 50,000 people mutilated. Yet, it was not until January 2002 that President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah declared the war over. In March, he lifted the four-year state of emergency, ahead of general elections in May 2002. A huge foreign presence supports his government. British troops, for example, have been there since mid-2000, re-training and re-arming the 8,000 strong government army. U.N. peacekeepers have disarmed around 47,000 fighters. It is likely that a special U.N. war crimes court will be established to try Foday Sankoh, the R.U.F. leader, for war crimes.

Forced conscription

The International Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers reported in June 2001 that some 5,000 child combatants were still in military forces in Sierra Leone, and a further 5,000 recruited for labour among armed groups. To date around 1,800 children have entered disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes.
Throughout the war years the Catholic church in Sierra Leone recognized that one of the most terrible consequences was the forced conscription of child soldiers. Many children rescued have been younger than Sawaneh. Sesay, for example, was a ten-year-old, drunk on cheap palm wine, when he clambered onto a Caritas Makeni truck at a roadside checkpoint last year. Once on board, he said that he had been fighting with rebel soldiers since he was seven and had risen to the rank of sergeant. He was leaving the army because there weren’t enough guns to go round any more. Then he added: I want my mum. Sesay had scarred his chest trying to scratch off the letters R.U.F. which had been branded onto him to prevent him absconding.
If we can find his father he will be counselled to see if he can accept his child back, which most do, explained Bishop George Biguzzi of Makeni. The bishop has been fully involved with rescuing and rehabilitating Sierra Leone’s child soldiers. He has been held hostage twice by rebel leaders whilst attempting to negotiate the safe release of children from their ranks. These children have been forced into doing things no child should ever do, says Bishop Biguzzi. Some of the children were just used as cheap labour, others trained as soldiers and were forced to commit atrocities, maybe to burn houses, to loot, and sometimes to bear arms and shoot. Girls were also abducted, some as wives and some gang raped or sexually abused. It was done to intimidate and terrorise people. Caritas Makeni runs four centres where children live whilst attempts are made to locate any surviving family. They receive shelter, clothes, food, friendship and trauma counseling. The idea is to make them feel accepted and loved by somebody, said Bishop Biguzzi. One of the worst things is to have destroyed their future and their hope. Ten boys rescued by Caritas Makeni stood in St. Peter’s Square with Bishop Biguzzi when he spoke at the children’s Jubilee festivities in Rome on 2 January 2000. Pope John Paul II publicly appealed to the international community to halt the recruitment of child soldiers five months later.
After hearing Sawaneh’s story last November, the U.N.’s executive body in New York decided, unanimously, to adopt a resolution, to be ratified by all member states, prohibiting the recruitment of children younger than 18. An estimated 300,000 child soldiers in more than 30 countries currently fight in the ranks of government and mercenary armies. The new treaty, an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has now been ratified by ten countries and entered into force on 12 February 2002. This is a huge advance in the effort to end the use of children as soldiers, says Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, a US-based founding organisation of the international Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, launched in 1998. A growing consensus that children are not acceptable tools of war is now backed up by binding international law, she added. Children of Angola, Burma, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Afghanistan, join those of Sierra Leone who will benefit from its implementation. In the U.K., Pax Christi, the international Catholic Movement for Peace, is lobbying the British government to sign the Treaty. The Treaty is important because it flags up an issue of common concern to groups involved internationally in peace and human rightswork, says Pat Gaffney, Pax Christi’s General Secretary in the U.K.

Victims of conflict

The effects of armed conflict on children has alarmed governments, non-governmental organisations, and the U.N. increasingly in recent years. This is due in large part to the work of Graca Machel, wife of Nelson Mandela. In her ground breaking 1996 report for the U.N., Graca Machel reported that around the world millions of children are caught up in conflicts in which they are not merely bystanders, but targets. More recently she stated: Wars have always victimised children and other non-combatants, but modern wars are exploiting, maiming and killing children more callously and more systematically than ever.According to U.N.I.C.E.F., in the last decade, child victims of armed conflict include 2 million killed, 4-5 million disabled, 12 million left homeless, more than 1 million orphaned or separated from their parents, and some 10 million traumatised.
War, violence and political instability continue to inflict appalling damage on the world’s children, said Secretary General Kofi A. Annan as he introduced Sawaneh last November. Ensuring that the next generation of the world’s children become harbingers of peace continues to drive international efforts to ensure that Sawaneh and thousands like him enjoy the childhood they are entitled to.