Killing as child's play

>> Children's role in modern warfare will be the topic of September conference hosted by Canada

By JOHN EDMONDS

The International Conference on War-Affected Children, to be held September 10-17 in Winnipeg, will be the first ever ministerial-level global conference on the plight of children in war.

But while this might seem like progress, it is in fact a sign to the contrary. In the 1996 State of the World's Children report, UNICEF--the United Nations Children's Fund, which is hosting the conference along with the government of Canada--reported that about two-million children had been killed, four- to five-million disabled, 12-million left homeless and over a million orphaned in wars since 1986. The conference is actually a reaction to a disturbing increase in abuse, murder and rape both of and by children in wars over the last two decades.

It's a trend that Montrealer Robert Lussier knows all too well. Lussier was communications director for UNICEF's west and central Africa division, based in Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire, from 1996 to November 1999, and he just returned this week from a trip to the region. He was also UNICEF's media pointman in Rwanda immediately after the genocide. All of this has given him the dubious honour of being wired into some of this century's worst humanitarian catastrophes--and their messy aftermath.

The Rwandan genocide, in which at least 500,000 ethnic Tutsis were massacred by rival Hutus in 1994, saw many children brutally butchered and thousands of others left as orphans. Now that the killing is over, the only thing left is to try and pick up the pieces.

"What we have now is tens of thousands of child-headed families," says Lussier. "Often they are headed by young girls, some as young as 11. When their parents and other relatives were killed, they became the heads of the family, sometimes looking after seven or eight younger siblings. We have done psychosocial evaluations of the needs of these children. Many have been severely traumatized."

Lussier says UNICEF, along with a host of NGOs, government agencies and private-sector philanthropists, have had considerable success in finding war orphans' extended families. The film manufacturer Kodak helped with the effort by sponsoring a program of putting up photographs of lost children in refugee camps. About 60 per cent of the war orphans have been reunited with kin, Lussier says, but thousands of others just have to make due as best they can, often turning to prostitution to support their younger siblings.



Good little warriors

But Lussier admits that helping innocent victims is easier in some ways than helping children who have themselves committed atrocities. Expert estimates place the worldwide number of child soldiers--combatants under the age of 18--at around 300,000. In Africa alone, the number is about 120,000. Many are very young when they start, some no more than six years old.

Why have child soldiers? Apparently children can make quite good warriors. Due to their relatively unformed and impressionable personalities, they are easily indoctrinated. They can be fearless, because they don't fully appreciate the dangers, and unquestioning, because they have no concept of what the war is actually about. And the use of children as soldiers has been facilitated by the widespread distribution of the AK-47, a light but deadly assault rifle that's so easy to operate killing becomes childplay.

While there are dozens of nations around the world where the use of child soldiers has been reported, some of the most grisly examples can be found in Sierra Leone, a small West African nation in the throes of a nine-year civil war.

A complex struggle that began in 1991, the fighting--which still lingers on--was between pro-government forces and two rebel groups, the largest and best-known being Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF). The RUF became infamous for its terror campaign of amputating the hands of villagers as a warning not to support the government side. They--as well as the pro-government Kamajor militia--abducted young children and teenagers, often after murdering their parents in front of them. Girls would be forced into sexual slavery and boys would be given a rifle and a bit of training and then be forced to participate in battles.

After a while, if they survived, some of them grew to like it. In a Radio Netherlands program first aired in January, several former child soldiers were interviewed. One of them, abducted at the tender age of eight, talked of raping as soon as he was able to and of killing up to five people a day. Eventually he earned the nickname "General Bloodshed." He also talked of being drugged much of the time, participating in dark rituals and of drinking blood every morning. "It was like my coffee," the now 15 year old says. Another Sierra Leonian former child soldier gave the following description to a journalist from the French newspaper Le Figaro of the tortures he and his unit inflicted on the enemy: "At 2 p.m. they gouge out two eyes, at 3 p.m. they cut off one hand, at 4 p.m. they cut off two hands, at 5 p.m. they cut off one foot and... at 7 p.m. it is the death which falls down."

Says Lussier: "A lot of these child soldiers were orphaned. But a lot of them who weren't couldn't return to their families or their villages because they weren't welcome. Most of the child soldiers of Sierra Leone have been demobilized, and thousands are now in special camps to help them adapt to a more normal life."



What to do?

According to Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade spokesperson Michael O'Shaughnessy, "The purpose of this conference is to try to get a resolution for a plan of action. We will bring that to the UN's Special Session on Children in 2001. We want to get policy-makers involved and create a children's agenda."

About 800 participants from over a hundred countries will attend, including the UN's war-affected children expert, Nelson Mandela's wife Graça Machel, the conference's honorary chair. The event is part of an increased high-level focus on the phenomenon, which includes a call from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to impose sanctions on nations that use minors on the front lines.

But while it's a sign that the international community--and especially Canada--is getting more serious about dealing with the child casualties and perpetrators of war, experts warn that war itself is changing. Conflicts are increasingly brutal to civilians, and more likely to be civil wars, often waged in remote locations. And UN resolutions will likely have little effect on rebels and ethnic militia.

For more information, check www.war-affected-children.gc.ca or www.unicef.org