In short: when states fail, when leaders go mad, when the chaos of violence takes over souls, the time is ripe for such terrible ideas to enter the minds of human beings and be acted out. This practice is not limited to Africa: consider the systematic creation and exploitation of vulnerable children as mass murderers during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. But because of my personal experience and because it is estimated that over half of the world’s child soldiers are in Africa, I will use select countries of the Great Lakes Region (particularly Burundi, the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda) as exemplars of the larger global problem.
What struck me when first arriving in the region in 1993 was the lushness of it, a far cry from the parched images of Africa I had been led to expect. I felt that I had truly entered an Eden of rolling green hills, brilliant tropical flowers and birds, rich mists hanging heavily in dewy valleys.
Each of the Great Lakes countries enjoys a moderate climate, rich soil, plentiful minerals (principally in the Congo) and substantial water supplies; given these blessings, they should be some of the more prosperous countries in the world. Instead, they are among the world’s poorest and most devastated. Centuries of Euro-Western interference and exploitation through slavery, colonialism, war, corruption and brutality—and the accompanying dislocations, diseases, poverty, underdevelopment, famine and internal conflicts—have practically destroyed the potential of these countries. Traditional societies have been brutally disrupted and ruthlessly repressed, creating populations in despair, prevented from natural development—and also creating an atmosphere of perceived impunity in which those who seek advantage through the use of force have been able to consider all possible options to achieve their ends, including the use of children as soldiers.
Hundreds of years of history can create a groundswell that finally erupts in ethnic conflict resulting from the subjugation of one tribe by another. But in other cases the source of the friction between the belligerents may be relatively recent. In the post-colonial era in Africa, disparities in power sharing and sheer poverty prevented democracy from settling in new sovereign states that were struggling to invent themselves within the artificial borders left behind by the colonial regimes. The fault lines in these new states were many, and violent outbursts were inevitable, leading in some extremes to ethnic cleansing and even genocide.
In the region’s civil wars (as in civil war anywhere: remember the recent Balkan conflict), the general population became both the target and, in the jockeying for power, the essential resource to husband—by horror, threats, lies, brute force and fear. The low levels of literacy and the demographic pressures of overpopulation—including the huge numbers of unemployed and poor youths—provided fuel to smouldering fires of discontent over obvious economic and social disparities. This disenchantment and disenfranchisement of youths is palpable in all of the region’s urban areas.
I witnessed this clearly in the Rwandan civil war and genocide. As the RPF was nearing victory, the extremists moved millions of citizens through narrow border openings into Tanzania and Goma in the DRC and through a newly established Humanitarian Protection Zone (created by the UN Security Council and enforced by a French and Franco-African peacekeeping coalition with a Chapter VII mandate that allowed the use of force). Hundreds of thousands of scared humans of all ages ended up in massive refugee and internally displaced persons’ camps over which the extremists maintained brutal and near complete control. Still armed with machetes and some small weapons, the extremist hierarchy and minions ran roughshod over the distribution of aid, from food to medical supplies to wood and water. They overwhelmed the large number of NGOs that had deployed just over the border in Rwanda for security reasons, only to find themselves being manipulated and even cowed by the extremists into giving up their control of the distribution of humanitarian relief supplies, hoping that at least some of the refugees would benefit. Rwandans of both ethnicities were held hostage in these camps, prevented from returning to their homes by brutal application of such measures as cutting the Achilles tendons of those who attempted to escape.
We in the West bear the brunt of responsibility for this conflict in and around Rwanda (and similarly throughout Africa). The “ethnic” groups that still battle for supremacy there—primarily the Hutus and the Tutsis—were originally named for their occupation rather than their ethnic identity: the Tutsis were known for cattle ownership and herding; the Hutus were farmers. Prior to the colonialist invasion of the late nineteenth century, a Hutu could become a Tutsi through the acquisition of cattle, and a Tutsi could become a Hutu by cultivating the land.
At the time of first contact with Europeans, these groups shared the same language, religion, culture, music, rhetoric, poetry and customs.
Newly arrived European colonialists concluded that the Tutsis were a superior race to the Hutus, based solely on European stereotypes (in other words, totally arbitrarily). As a result, the Tutsis were given some access to schools, exempted from forced labour and allowed to hold minor positions in the civil service. They were also taught that they were superior and the natural rulers of the country (under the greater colonial power, of course) and that the majority Hutus were inferior and only of value as little more than animal labour.
For generations, first under the Germans and later under the Belgians, Tutsis and Hutus were taught this European interpretation of their history. Saddling these people with a false, and racist, identity led to devastating consequences: a civil war and genocide in which, along with the massive loss of life, many children, on both sides, were killed, orphaned or turned into killers.
In the rest of Africa, and elsewhere on the planet, the end of the Cold War created a perfect storm in which many nascent democracies fell victim to dictators who had been propped up by the West or East during the post-colonial period. When the West came out on top and the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Western governments simply abandoned countries formerly in their sphere of influence to sort out the tenuous status of their systems of democracy, governance, rule of law and human rights on their own. The Soviet sphere similarly withered for lack of attention and for lack of money in the financial crisis that soon hit Russia and the former Eastern bloc.
To top off this act of abandonment, the West also imposed demanding and unachievable milestones on such countries: they had to get on with democratization if they wanted aid support from governments and from international financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Our irresponsibility in the colonial, post-colonial and post–Cold War periods is staggering. Our governments created elites but turned a blind eye to leaders who failed to serve their people before themselves. We set them up for failure—we at worst nurtured and at best ignored corruption and graft, the illegal exploitation of resources by multinational corporations and the local elites, and the increasing misery of millions—and when we turned away, happy that the Cold War was over and claiming victory and the birth of a kinder, gentler era, a new world order even, they threw that rhetoric back in our faces.
In such states, the core of government soon collapsed; the police, judiciary and other bodies serving to maintain law and order have either ceased to exist or are no longer able to operate. For example, in the DRC (Zaire at that time), militias disintegrated into armed gangs of looters, and military commanders set up in business on their own account using army units as the muscle behind efforts to enrich themselves, while state-owned economic resources were exploited for the private benefit of those in power. Eyewitness reports from Liberia and Sierra Leone speak of the whole society—adults and children alike—falling into the grip of a collective insanity after government institutions broke down. The typical feature of such a “failed state” is the brutality and intensity of the violence its citizens face. These internal conflicts exhibit a highly unpredictable and explosive dynamic all their own and a radicalization of violence.
Such imploding nation states around the world—but primarily where the big powers had interests—create
d a wave of humanitarian catastrophes in the past twenty years, and in consequence factions in these failing states reverted to the use of arms to gain some advantages not available from incompetent governments. Global warming now threatens to bring the African continent, in particular, catastrophic famine and unrest.
And, at the heart of this tragedy are millions of children, too many of whom have suffered from one unique crime against humanity: namely being used as child soldiers.
We cannot undo what has happened to them, but we can commit ourselves now to aiming for a future in which children are never employed as soldiers in war. In this and the following two chapters, drawing on the initial research I led at the Carr Center, on the work of NGOs and journalists, and on the Child Soldiers Initiative (CSI) research project that I founded, I want to show you how child soldiers are made, how they are being used, and how they are being disarmed, demobilized and reintegrated—where that is possible—in an effort to deconstruct these practices and brainstorm solutions for their eradication.
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What was it that created the child soldier as a weapon system, specifically? Obviously, the reasons were many and complex, and fundamentally tragic, but in the interest of necessary analysis for creating solutions, I will attempt to itemize and exemplify them with only the occasional diatribe or dissolution into a puddle of tears.
The reasons range from the social and historical (such as poverty and instability, as I described above), to the practical and tactical (such as the increasing availability of children in developing countries, their intrinsic malleability, and the accessibility of small arms or light weapons easy for them to use), to the downright sinister (proven “successes” in the field, legal impunity, and outright disregard for the humanity of individual children).
First I’d like to consider the life of an average child growing up in any of the countries of the Great Lakes Region of Africa and what makes him or her particularly vulnerable to recruitment as a child soldier.
While children are naturally resilient and predisposed to happiness—in my experience, all the more so in developing nations, where children at play but with no toys to speak of rely deeply on their ingenuity and curiosity—the instability of the region means that the vast majority of children grow up in extreme and abject poverty, undernourished, with poor survival rates, next to no health care and sanitation, and limited access to any education, let alone free schooling.
Imagine yourself as a child in this region. Chances are you live in a rural community or on a small plot of land, and survival depends on your family successfully planting and tending a crop through to harvest. While the soil is very rich, and in a good year your family can get two crops out of it, overpopulation has made subsistence farming tenuous at best—larger families have access to less and less land. Even if your harvest is successful, it will provide only barely adequate sustenance for survival.
Basically, if the weather co-operates you eat, but if it does not, and too much or too little rain falls, then your harvest fails and you starve to death unless food aid arrives. You are constantly undernourished and are most likely to be stunted in growth and underweight, as well as suffering from any number of vitamin deficiencies and other ailments in consequence. Climate change due to global warming, deforestation and the soil erosion that results all point to a future of drought, famine and death, but those are the problems of tomorrow and you and your family are only thinking of survival today.
A successful harvest in itself is no guarantee that you’ll eat. The crop could be stolen by bandits or soldiers, or destroyed by fighting, or abandoned because you and your family have had to flee from the inter-communal violence or catastrophic civil wars that are plaguing your homeland.
As a child in this region, you most likely have several brothers and sisters, but at least one in five has died at birth, and another one before five years of age, and a third before adulthood due to pandemics like HIV/AIDS and sicknesses like tuberculosis and malaria. Your mother has a one-in-thirteen chance of dying in childbirth, and your whole family knows well the impact of sickness and disease, and all too often death.
Proper sanitation and health care are almost non-existent, and even if medicine is available your family most likely cannot afford it. Your parents and sexually active siblings have approximately a one-in-fifteen chance of contracting HIV/AIDS, which is usually a slow, painful death sentence. In this area, I witnessed a whole generation of one family wiped out in a single year by AIDS; the grandmothers could not cope with the orphans and there was no government support system to help them either. In the past, when parents died there was always an extended family member to take a child in, which shows the overwhelming cultural strength and sense of responsibility of the family here. The concept of orphans is new to the region.
Water, a basic human need, is a daily challenge. A clean, potable supply is rarely within a reasonable distance of your home. The fetching of water is an oppressive chore, and if you are a girl, that chore falls squarely upon your shoulders. Many girls walk several kilometres every day to fetch filthy and contaminated water, encountering numerous threats to their well-being. Sometimes they begin the chore so young they become physically deformed by carrying the heavy loads. They are often prevented from attending school regularly because they simply do not have the time.
As a child in this region, you are most likely barely literate and have little or no access to the education or technical training that could improve your lot in life. You speak a family language of Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, Swahili or one of dozens of others among different groups in the region, but you are not able to read and write that language unless you’ve been lucky enough to be able to go to school. As the traditional oral transmission of history and customs is being eroded by pandemics like HIV/AIDS, where elders are overburdened and often sick themselves, literacy has become increasingly important even as it has become harder to obtain. Unless you can go to school, you will also not learn to speak, read or write one of the European languages, like English or French, which can also become a route to a better life.
Most children don’t attend school because their families cannot spare them from daily survival chores or they cannot afford the fees they need to pay since the state pays teachers a pittance at most and doesn’t supply school materials. Due to the conflicts in the region, children may not be able to attend even if they can afford the time or money to go because the local school has been shut down (the teacher may have died or been killed, the building may have been destroyed). Too often there is simply no school within walking distance (especially in areas populated by internally displaced and refugee families).
If you live in an area where a school does exist, and your family can afford to let you attend, you likely still have to walk a long time to get there and back every day, risking attack from animals—and from other humans. Packed into a one-room schoolhouse with over forty students of all different levels, with a blackboard painted on one wall and very limited access to paper and pencils, you are fighting an uphill battle to get a modicum of education. Homework is often impossible. So close to the equator, the sun rises rapidly at six in the morning and sets abruptly at about six at night. By the time your meagre supper is eaten and chores are done, it is pitch black inside and out; candles are expensive and there is next to no access to electric light. In the morning, you need to be up before dawn to fetch water, or prepare the fire and help with breakfast, so there’s not much time to study then, either.
Still, an important advantage to the presence of a school in a village or close at hand is that it is a significant sign of stability and security for the children as well as for the parents. And no matter how rudimentary, a school provides discipline, colourful uniforms, friendships and a place to play and escape from the mundane but essential daily chores—aspects of school that can be just as important to a child in a developing country as feeding his or her hunger for learning. Where schools do not exist, children are often denied thei
r right to play, to dream and to grow.
But it is too often the elite children in urban areas, ones who have proven their “exceptional” abilities, who actually get an education, subsidized by religious groups or NGOs. Imagine the overt friction this style of subsidization creates within societies, the envy felt by parents and children with no such advantage but the wit to know that education is the only effective route to better circumstances. Add to this disparity religious, ethnic or tribal differences, passed on both overtly and subtly in the curriculum, and you have conditions that can synergize into the worst possible scenario, as was the case in Rwanda.
As a poor, rural child who has not been able to attend school, from your very early teens you would have a lot of empty hours between your search for food, the odd manual job, and other less reputable ways of surviving and helping your family to survive. Or you may not even be near your family anymore, having been pushed out by no food and too many siblings as soon as you had any chance of making it on your own, and ending up homeless and drifting in the urban slums.
In those slums, and even in the rural areas where farming has been increasingly marginalized and disrupted by climate change and war, there is no worthwhile or satisfying work for millions of essentially disenfranchised youths. Talk about a ready and willing recruitment base for any group that has an idea or an ideology, that can provide some sustenance, some means of bonding, and a bit of the power that comes from belonging to an organized outfit. Imagine arming these youths on top of that, and the dangerous ego trips that can result.
And so the constant companions of war, abject poverty, sickness and migration over the turbulent decades since independence in the late 1950s, make the children of this region particularly vulnerable to a myriad of tragedies, not the least of which is being recruited—willingly or not—into the fraternity of armed groups or even into the government forces as a child soldier. In fact, most of the conflicts, not just in the Great Lakes Region of Africa but around the world, that have employed, or are employing, child soldiers occur in countries where there is an unstructured political, economic and social environment. Ineffective and incompetent governments can’t keep track of their voting-age citizens, let alone their children, and orphans are often not missed.