I joined the Army when I was fourteen because, one, I was persuaded that the only way to get my parents back or to stop that from happening was to be a part of the Army and kill those people who were responsible for killing my parents. But, you see, the thing that is very disturbing about this thing is that once I joined the Army and started fighting, I was also killing other people’s parents and so I was creating a circle of revenge where I killed somebody else’s parents, he’s going to be persuaded by a different group, either the RUF or the Army, saying, “Okay. Join the Army and kill this person who killed your parents.” So, it’s a circle of revenge. And the disturbing thing about it is that it’s kids that are killing kids.
—I., age fourteen1
Transforming a child into a fairly effective combatant is disturbingly simple. It begins with recruitment, either through abduction or “voluntary” means. Recruitment is rapidly followed by cruel but straightforward methods of training and conversion. Brutality and abuses of the worst kind underscore each stage, but these lie in part behind the overall program’s usual effectiveness. The ultimate aim of the process is to foster a child’s dependency on an armed organization and inhibit escape.
Case studies indicate that in the majority of conflicts, a primary method of recruitment of children is through some form of abduction. Typically, recruiting parties are given conscription targets that change according to the group’s need and objective. For example, the UPC/RP, a militia led by Thomas Lubanga in the eastern Congo, has a policy that each family within its area of control must provide a cow, money, or child to the group.2 Often, the groups develop practices that are quite efficient. For example, the LRA sets numeric goals for child recruits and sends raiding parties into villages to meet them.3 Other groups, such as the LTTE, reportedly maintain sophisticated computerized population databases to direct their recruiting efforts.4
All children are not automatically taken in such operations, but only those who meet certain criteria decided by the groups’ leaders. The main standard is physical size, with the ability to bear a weapon being the normal cutoff point. Literally, recruiters will place a weapon in the child’s hands to see if he or she is yet strong enough to hold it.5 Other groups use alternative proxies to measure physical development. The SPLA, for instance, uses the presence of two molar teeth to determine whether the child is ready to serve.6
These standards not only illustrate the young ages often pulled in, but also how child recruitment is often a meticulously planned process. Those children who are judged too small to carry weapons or looted goods will either be set free or killed in order to intimidate both the local populace and the new recruits. Similarly, if the plan is to seize girls as attendants to more senior members of the group, only those considered more attractive might be taken. These goals are taken quite seriously, and failure to meet them risks punishment from superiors.7
The decision of where groups carry out their operations to find their recruits is also based on planned efforts to maximize the efficiency of their efforts. Both state armies and rebel groups typically target the places where children will both be collected in the greatest number and are most vulnerable to being swept in. These range from stadiums and buses to mosques and churches.
The most frequent targets are secondary schools or orphanages, where children of suitable size are collected in one place, but out of contact with their parents, who would try to spirit them away. Indeed, the LTTE even took to setting up a unit formed exclusively of orphans, the elite Sirasu Puli (Leopard Brigade).8 The Congolese Rally for Democracy–Goma (RCD–Goma) and Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) are two other groups that also target schools almost exclusively, using kidnapping or coercion to pull in kids. Another common target area is the marketplace. For instance, during the Ethiopian fighting in the 1990s, a common practice was that armed militias would simply surround the public bazaar. They would order every male to sit down and then force into a truck anyone deemed “eligible.” This often included minors.
Homeless or street children are at particular risk, as they are most vulnerable to sweeps aimed at them, which prompt less public outcry. In Sudan, for instance, the government set up camps for street children, and then rounded up children to fill them in a purported attempt to “clean up” Khartoum. These camps, however, served as reservoirs for army conscription.9
Other groups that are at frequent danger are refugee and IDP (internally displaced persons) populations. In many instances, families on the run become disconnected. Armed groups then target unaccompanied, and thus more vulnerable, minors.
The international community can even become unintentionally complicit in the recruitment of children, if it is not careful in its own practices. For example, in the Sudanese civil war, unaccompanied minors living in the UNHCR refugee camps were housed in separate areas from the rest of the refugee population. As the camps had no security, the SPLA easily targeted the boys. Indeed, certain rebel commanders even sought to have camps placed near them, not for humanitarian reasons, but so that they could maintain a reserve of recruits close at hand.10
I was abducted during “Operation Pay Yourself,” in 1998. I was 9 years old. Six rebels came through our yard. They went to loot for food. It’s called “jaja”—“get food.” They said, “We want to bring a small boy like you—we like you.” My mother didn’t comment; she just cried. My father objected. They threatened to kill him. They argued with him at the back of the house. I heard a gunshot. One of them told me, “Let’s go, they’ve killed your father.” A woman rebel grabbed my hand roughly and took me along. I saw my father lying dead as we passed.
—A., age fourteen11
Even national borders can fail to provide protection. In numerous instances, rebel groups target foreign villages just across the borders, which heretofore might have been considered outside the danger zone. In the Liberian war, for example, it was not uncommon to come across a child from Sierra Leone who had been abducted into the fighting. Similar cases hold in the Myanmar war with Thailand, the Colombian war with Peru, and all the nations surrounding the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
In many ways, these tactics of abduction and impressment into service echo the naval press gangs of the Napoleonic era. The difference is not just the lower ages, however, but that the present-day abduction raids are not only about building one’s force, but are also instruments of war in and of themselves. Forced recruitment of children is often just one aspect in a larger campaign carried out by an armed group, designed to intimidate local civilian communities. Having already crossed one line of propriety, armed groups that abduct children for soldiering are also inclined to go on rape and looting rampages while in the villages.12 Likewise, the children of certain ethnic groups might be targeted, in particular if there is a chance to use child soldiers against their co-ethnics on the other side. This was the case in Guatemala, where government recruitment of minors usually focused on the children of ethnic groups that had been in the political opposition. The indigenous Mayans called the theft of their young “the new genocide.”13
It was an unbelievable and unreal event when the rebels arrested me and my family. We were told to carry their loads on our heads. We did so for some time and my sister cried out in pain to tell them she was sick and wanted to rest. The rebels asked us if we all wanted to rest, not knowing that after telling them we wanted to rest, they had planned something else for us.
We were left seated there for a while and they came back with cutlasses and a log of wood. We knew too well what these things mean, because we have heard that with these things they cut off the hands and feet of people. Now we were in a hideous state—they killed my parents in front of me, my uncle’s hands were cut off and my sister was raped in front of us by their commander called “Spare No Soul.” After all this happened, they told us, the younger boys, to join them. If not, they were going to kill us. I was in place to die with my parents because I felt like killing them myself—but they had something which I did not: a gun. I and my sister were left in a traumatized state. We had no parents any longer, and my sister was in pain after having been raped, and my own toe was cut off.
—R., age unknown14
For those children who are forcibly taken, it is often “a journey into hell.”15 Abduction is by definition an act of violence that rips terrified children from the security of their families and homes. Killings, rapes, and severe beatings often accompany it. Once caught, children have no choice; usually they must comply with their captors or die.
Not all children are forced into soldiering, though. Many may choose to join an armed group of their own volition and thus the groups that use them often claim they broke no moral codes. The rough trend line seems to be that roughly two of every three child soldiers have some sort of initiative in their own recruitment. For example, estimates are that 40 percent of the FARC’s child soldiers are forced into service, and 60 percent joined of their own volition.16 Another survey in East Asia found that 57 percent of the children had volunteered.17 Finally, a survey of child soldiers in four African countries found that 64 percent joined under no threat of violence.18
To describe this choice as voluntary, however, is greatly misleading.19 Children are defined as such, not only because of their lesser physical development, but also because they are judged to be of an age at which they are not capable of making mature decisions. By contrast, to go to war and risk one’s life in an act that has societal-wide consequences is one of the most serious decisions a person can make. This is why the previous four thousand years of leaders left this choice to mature adults.
But how can a child volunteer? Because if I volunteer, maybe I don’t know what I am doing, but you, the grown-up, should know. And you should stop me from volunteering being a soldier. It wasn’t my choice. It wasn’t the choice I had to become a soldier.
—C., child soldier from age nine to fifteen20
The most basic reason that children join armed groups is that they are driven to do so by forces beyond their control. A particularly strong factor is economic. Hunger and poverty are endemic in conflict zones. Children, particularly those orphaned or disconnected from civil society, may volunteer to join any group if they believe that this is the only way to guarantee regular meals, clothing, or medical attention. As one young boy in the DRC explained, “I joined [President Laurent] Kabila’s army when I was 13 because my home had been looted and my parents were gone. As I was then on my own, I decided to become a soldier.”21 Indeed, surveys of demobilized child soldiers in the DRC found that almost 60 percent originally joined armed groups because of simple poverty.22 The same ratio was found in a separate survey of child soldiers half the globe away in East Asia, indicating a broader international trend.23
The military was in need of people to increase their number. All the boys in the village were asked to join the army. There was no way out. If I left the village I would get killed by the rebels who would think that I was a spy. On the other hand, if I stayed in the village and refused to join the army, I wouldn’t be given food and would eventually be thrown out, which was as good as being dead
—I., age fourteen24
There are no hard-and-fast rules. However, poorer children are typically more vulnerable to being pulled into conflict and are overrepresented in child soldier groups. Not only is their desperation typically higher, but also there is a higher correlation between family dysfunction (an additional driving force) and lower socioeconomic status.25
To be fully understood, these decisions must therefore be read within the environment in which they take place. In Afghanistan, for instance, boys growing up over the last decades are likely to have never known running water or electricity, and many will have lost one or more parents to the fighting. By the age of ten, most forgo school and are simply trying to find a way to support themselves. One report tellingly illustrated how a set of Afghan boys were so desperate that they literally had to choose between following a cow around to scoop up its excrement to sell as fuel or joining one of the armed factions. The choice of war may be more dangerous, but it at least provides free clothes, food, and some modicum of respect.26 Or, as one Congolese child soldier similarly described, “I heard that the rebels at least were eating. So, I joined them.”27
The same factors may also drive parents to offer their children for combat service when they cannot provide for them on their own. In some cases, armies pay a minor soldier’s wages directly to the family. Other case studies tell of parents who encourage their daughters to become soldiers if their marriage prospects are poor. As one study done in Sierra Leone described, “Many mothers have remarked on the joy of seeing their ten-year-old dressed in a brand-new military attire carrying an AK-47. For some families the looted property that child soldiers brought home further convinced them of the need to send more children to the war front to augment scarce income.”28
More perniciously, some parents may see material advantages in their children’s death. In Sri Lanka, parents within LTTE-controlled zones who lose a child are treated with special status as “great hero families.” They pay no taxes, receive job preferences, and are allocated special seats at all public events.29 This type of familial prompting toward children’s participation in terrorism and the cult of martyrdom has been a great concern in the Israeli-Palestinian violence, and will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 7. Parents may also drive children into war indirectly. A good portion of girl soldiers who join as “volunteers” cite domestic abuse or exploitation as the underlying reason.30
Structural conditions in the midst of conflict may also oblige children to join armed organizations for their own protection. Surrounded by violence and chaos, children may decide they are safer in a conflict group, with guns in their own hands, than going about by themselves unarmed. In one survey of child soldiers in Africa, nearly 80 percent had witnessed combat around their home, 70 percent had their family home destroyed, and just over 59 percent had a family member become a casualty of war.31 As one child in Liberia (whose nickname was “Colonel One More War”) noted of why he joined an armed faction, “We can’t sit out. People are killing some of our friends. Can’t die for nothing, so I took gun and fight. Thanks God I survived.”32
Many children may have personally experienced or been witness to the furthest extremes of violence, including massacres, summary executions, ethnic cleansing, death squad killings, bombings, torture, sexual abuse, and destruction of home or property. Thus, vengeance can also be a particularly powerful impetus to join the conflict.33
Often, child soldiers are the survivors of family massacres. They experience what is known as “survivor’s guilt,” and are often filled with anger and desire for revenge.34 Indeed, a number of child soldiers are motivated to join warring factions by the seemingly noble belief that they are helping to prevent other children from losing their parents. Only afterwards do they reflect that they may end up creating the same cycle for other children.
However, such victimization need not always be directly personal for the child to feel its power. The violence may have happened to a family member, a friend, a neighbor, or even some member of a group that the child feels a part of and thus experiences the incident almost as deeply.35
My father, mother, and brothers were killed by the enemy, I became angry. I didn’t have any other way to do, unless I have to revenge. And to revenge is only to have a gun. If I have a gun I can revenge. I can fight and avenge my mother, father and brothers. That is the decision I took to become a soldier. The day my mother and father and brothers were killed, the enemy came by surprise. They attacked the village, they gathered the people and after that they took all the cows, and they burned all the houses, even all our clothes were burned inside the houses. We remained naked, without food, and we were suffering, from hunger even. Nakedness was also a problem. Then I decided what to do. I thought I’d better join the army [SPLA].
—M., age sixteen36
This aspect of revenge is particularly strong within what anthropologists refer to as “shame cultures.” In these cultures, which often have clanlike social structures, the desire to preserve honor or avoid shame is so strong as to shape or override all other principles.37 As such, a child who has experienced some type of loss in such a setting, particularly of a blood relative, will not see him- or herself to be of worth until the loss is avenged. For example, young Kosovar Albanians, within whom this ethic is quite strong, repeatedly cited it as their obligation to join the local rebel groups. Similarly, Afghan boys cite how they cannot become a “man” until they exact revenge upon those who killed a parent.38
When I was fighting, I enjoyed it—killing and destroying. I killed human being, many; young, old, anyone. The first one, an old lady, I shot from far away. I was very angry, so I shot her. Their families killed my people.
—M., age unknown39
Lastly, some groups may take deliberate advantage of the fact that adolescents are at a stage in life where they are still defining their identity. Conflict groups offer what are perceived as glamorous or honorable roles (soldier, hero, leader, protector), as well as membership and acceptance in a group. These messages are particularly seductive in areas where children feel the most powerless or victimized. As essayist Roger Rosenblatt notes, “War allows boys to look like men. This seems a shallow benefit, but it is no small thing for a teenage boy to have something that yanks him out of his social floundering and places him, unlaughed at, in the company of heroes.”40 One survey of child soldiers in Africa found that 15 percent volunteered because they were simply fascinated by the prestige and thrill of serving in a unit and having a gun.41
Indeed, the vulnerability of young children compared to adults is illustrated by the deliberate practices that many conflict groups utilize to take advantage of children’s innocence. They often involve extraordinary or impossible promises to which only gullible children would give credence. In Sierra Leone, for example, the RUF promised poor rural children that fighting would help them escape the poverty and misery many of them had known all their lives. As one child fighter describes, “They told us we’d all have our own vehicle. They told us they’d build houses for us. They told us many things.”42 In Liberia, Charles Taylor promised that every child fighting for his group would get a computer if he won the war.43 In Iran, young boys were promised that as long as they were wearing a key around their neck when they died in battle, it would unlock their way into heaven.44 Other times, the promises can be quite simple for groups to fulfill, but equally illogical as a cause to fight in war. In Sri Lanka, for example, a number of young LTTE child fighters were convinced to join because the group promised to teach them how to drive tractors or motorcycles.45
I was placed in a three-month political formation course. We learned how to “educate the masses” and to recruit more kids. They chose pretty girls and handsome boys to do the recruiting, because the kids would fancy them. We used to lie to potential recruits. We’d say that we’d pay them and that life was good … Most were fourteen or fifteen. The commanders preferred minors because they learn better and are healthier. The ideal recruit is about thirteen, because then they can get a full political education.
—C., age eighteen (recruited at age thirteen)46
Conflict groups may also use education systems to glorify war, in order to induce children to identify with and join their organization. For example, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Education Center for Afghanistan was located in Peshawar, Pakistan, and was operated by Afghan mujahideen. It produced a series of children’s books that became the basis of primary education across the country when the Taliban took power. Across the board they promoted to youths the concept of violence for the sake of Islam. These ranged from teaching the alphabet to first graders through warlike examples (such as “Jim [is for] Jihad”) to illustrating mathematics to third graders with militant word problems (“One group of Mujahideen attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fled?”). Ironically, these textbooks were paid for by U.S. government grants.47
The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3,200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.
—Word problem from fourth-grade Afghan textbook48
Propaganda and media distortion also can play a role. The aim is both to spread lies and stories that dehumanize the opponent and to create a meaning and direction that might otherwise be lacking among their youth audience. In Rwanda, for example, the Hutu government used radio to spread hatred of the Tutsis. The Tutsis were demonized as murderous outsiders, despite the fact that they had lived in the country for centuries. This helped induce disaffected Hutu children to join the youth militias and prepare them for their roles as killers in the 1994 genocide.49
In the end, children may join such groups simply because they are kids, and the slightest of whims or appeals may suffice to impel them to enter war. Observers report that many child soldiers in the Karen militia groups in Myanmar joined in search of some excitement in their lives. They simply found the daily grind of life in the refugee camps across the border in Thailand to be boring.50 Other conflict groups will intentionally hold parades and conduct training near schools or send patrols through villages. The aim is to spread a happy, popular image and use this to gain volunteers. Even if the recruits do not join immediately, these sorts of tactics create a legacy that can pay off as the children later grow.
I joined the army when I was young [at age fifteen] without thinking much. I admired soldiers, their guns and crisp, neat uniforms. I just wanted to fight the way they did in the movies and so I joined the army.
—H., age twenty-one51
Peer pressure may be used as well. For example, LTTE recruiters would visit schools and screen films of the government’s depredations and their own successful attacks (teachers risk death if they try to prevent this access). The recruiters deliberately boss around teachers and force school bands to play at funerals for the dead of the group. In doing so, they show who is at the head of the social order, at least within a society at war. Then, child soldiers already in the group, wearing natty new uniforms and shiny boots, would be presented to the class. They would ask for a show of hands for whoever supports the cause of independence. Upon this, all those with hands raised would be driven to the LTTE training camps.52 Likewise, a number of groups teach songs or poems that ridicule children who are not part of the cause.
Stop! O Younger brother
Even if I weigh and sell you
I can sell you for a good price even tomorrow.
It is not for tying ten palmyrah trees and chopping them
You are growing fat in your youth and idling.
Why does hair grow on your face and body?
Younger brother, you must be brave.
Go! You are the cyclone
Rise and Fight.
—“Poem to the Young Boy,”
a LTTE recruitment song53
It is also important to note that, when growing up in a war zone, children will often experience an essential militarization of their daily life. The threat of death becomes a normal occurrence and their regular experiences will be shaped by the omnipresence of combatants around them. It is in this “amoral vacuum” that groups seeking child soldiers offer a voice that can appeal to lost children.54 Some groups even try to reinforce this omnipresence by surrounding children’s homes and schools with further images of war. These range from the typical wall murals that dot nearly every conflict zone to the LTTE’s unique practice of building “memorial parks” for its “martyrs.” These memorials are actually playgrounds designed to entice children to become soldiers. They even have militarized playground equipment such as seesaws that have toy automatic weapons mounted on the handles.55