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Child soldiers and reintegrating them back into society

I learnt many things. I killed a man because I told him to stop and he didn’t. I did the same to a woman who was afraid to stop, I ran after her and I killed her. I came across a 12 year old girl and I cut off both her hands. Right when we got back from this operation, I killed a man in his cabin. We had been told that everyone in the village must die. (14 year old boy. Source: Amnesty International)
Child soldiers are ideal because they don’t complain, they don’t expect payment and if you tell them to kill, then they kill. (Leader of the Chad National Army)

In 2000 the United Nations General Assembly approved the Optional Protocol to the Convention on Rights of the Child on the involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. Ratified by more than 100 States, the document prohibits the participation and recruitment of children under 18 into any type of armed group or military service.

According to the latest Global Report published in 2008 by the “Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers” there are still thousands of children today participating in hostilities in at least 86 countries and territories around the world. This includes illegitimate and forced recruitment of children by armed groups, governmental forces and militias, as well as legal enlisting in peace time armies.

The report demonstrates that, although there is an increasingly greater consensus and international willingness to end child participation in armed conflicts, the problem is actually far from resolved.

In wartime children can be used for everything: fighting, cooking, fetching water, sending messages, spying, etc. It is estimated that over the last decade more than one and a half million children have suffered this type of abuse. The majority have been taken from their homes at gunpoint, others “voluntarily” joined the war because it was impossible to survive in their family environment, often destroyed by the conflict.

Child soldiers are very useful for their recruiters. They are loyal, they carry out orders without rebelling, they are not allowed to be afraid, they are easily replaceable and also fulfil a sexual function for the adults. This is accentuated for the girls, who usually suffer continuous rapes and sexual aggressions.

The personal cost they have to pay is very high. If they manage to survive the fighting, in some cases the desensitisation and in others the trauma affects them their whole lives. When the war is over, the majority feel completely orphaned and lost, with no family, no home and no job.

In an attempt to tackle the reinsertion problem, many countries have adopted Programmes for Disarming, Demobilising and Reintegrating Child Soldiers (DDR). In this way, when a war or conflict finishes, this type of initiative tries to reintegrate the children by offering them an alternative life and helping them to start living in the community again. With psycho-social support, education, vocational training and projects to earn a living, they have a chance to move forward.

However, one of the problems of DDR is the fact that many children who have lived through this type of experience are frightened of revealing their identity and therefore do not register in the programmes. They are scared of being rejected. Also, lack of financing and deficient planning has meant that the results from these initiatives have not been as good as hoped.

In this respect, the Paris Commitments, which were backed by 58 countries, mark a series of directives and provide guidance for disarming, demobilising and reintegrating children who were recruited or used in armed conflict. They were approved during a ministerial conference, held in February 2007, organised by UNICEF and the French Foreign Affairs Minister.

Within the international framework, first measures have also been taken to determine the individual penal responsibility of anyone who has used children in hostilities. The International Penal Court (IPC) Statute came into force in 2002. In this context, Thomas Lubanga, founder and head of the Union of Congolese Patriots, was taken before this international court accused of war crimes for using children under 15 years old in his rebel force. This case will mark a milestone in the world in general and the Democratic Republic of the Congo particularly, where people responsible for terrible crimes have generally got away with it.

Outside Africa, many European and American countries apply double morals. On the one hand, they criticise the use of child soldiers, and yet they accept minors into their armed forces. In the United Kingdom the minimum age for (voluntarily) enlisting in the Armed Forces in 16. Other European countries where the Armed Forces accept children of 16 are Belgium, Bosnia, Ireland, Slovakia and Switzerland.

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