Childhood Deployed: Remaking Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone

Introduction

>> 1 Introduction Jerihun was the site of an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp between Bo and Kenema in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone. When I arrived there in 2001, the camp was fairly new, having only been in operation for about six months. It was designed as a transit camp for Sierra Leoneans returning from refugee camps in Guinea, mainly Kono people who had been away from their villages for ten years. The camp housed several thousand IDPs in small stick and mud huts built by the occupants themselves. They were completely supported by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). All of their food, water, education, medicine, and other supplies came from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency), and other subcontracting NGOs. I chose to visit this camp because former child soldiers were being reunified with distant family in the camps—sometimes, ironically, with family they had never met. My goal was to study the reintegration of these former child combatants and their experiences with both Western agencies and their home communities after the war was over. After clearing my presence with the NGO running the camp, I walked around and greeted people. The NGO staff there was unprepared to help me and, in fact, seemed completely unaware of who the ex-combatants were or where they were staying. I heard from various 2 > 3 although they did not know him, he is family to them. (Also, there is now an extra name on their feeding card at the camp.) Sahr’s brother had put a lot of effort into making their little house very nice, even planting a flower garden with seeds he brought with him from Guinea. Sahr had never been to school. At the age of fourteen he was in class 1, the equivalent of the first grade in the United States. I asked him if he minded being in class with little kids. He said, “No. Everything has its stage.” I asked him if he could write his name and he proudly replied, “Yes!” I asked him to write it for me in my notebook. He went to his brother for help with the “S” but his brother refused, urging, “No, you can do it yourself.” So he wrote for me proudly SAHR—all in capital letters , with a backward S. * * * This book is about the reintegration of former child soldiers in Sierra Leone. The international community defines a child soldier, or a “child associated with an armed force or armed group,” as “any person below 18 years of age who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to children , boys, and girls used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities” (UNICEF 2007, 7). In Sierra Leone, children were recruited and used by every fighting faction; girls as well as boys were trained to fight and to carry out a full range of other warrelated activities. Since 2002 when the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone came to an end, some forty international and local nongovernmental organizations have worked there to reintegrate an estimated seven thousand former child combatants (DeBurca 2000; Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers 2002).2 This book is about what happened after these child soldiers demobilized and struggled to return to “normal” life, rather than on their mobilization into fighting forces or what they did while they carried guns. How did they conceive of their time “in the bush”? How did other Sierra Leoneans see them? What was the process of so-called reintegration like? This book examines, from the ground up, children’s and adults’ own experiences of postwar rebuilding. The analysis is based on 4 > 5 reintegration differs for boys and girls, ex-combatants of different fighting factions, and formal and informal reintegrators, illuminates the contours of these political struggles. In this book, we hear the voices of the former child soldiers themselves, in their multiple social contexts. The most innovative contribution of this work is that it addresses the vast majority of former child soldiers who forego participation in formal reintegration programs and, in the language of NGOs, “spontaneously reintegrate” after war. Moreover, this book argues that UN- and NGO-sponsored programs for child soldiers have unintended effects as they seek to change...