Child Soldiers in the Age of Fractured States

Chapter 4. No Place to Hide: Refugees, Displaced Persons, and Child Soldier Recruits

55 Reports of Taliban recruitment of children asinsurgentsandpossible suicide bombers surfaced in the U.S. media in August 2005 (CNN 2005). Estimates at the time suggested that the insurgent forces in Afghanistan may have comprised up to 8,000 children (IRIN 2003a). To many in the West, this was a surprising revelation, but it should not have been. Children participated in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and had been used as soldiers by the Taliban against Soviet forces in the 1980s.1 Many of the current adult insurgents in Afghanistan came from the ranks of these former child soldiers (Center for Defense Information 2001). News of their use in Afghanistan has only added a new strategic security dimension to the growing list of consequences of the rapidly increasing numbers of child soldiers across the globe.2 No longer does this phenomenon simply represent a moral dilemma or a problem whose consequences are geographically confined to belligerent forces in fragile or failed states. Added to this increased complexity is the growth in the volume of child soldiers. One UN source suggests that their number grew from 200,000 to 300,000 between 1988 and 2002;3 by the latter date they served in seventy-two government or rebel armed forces in about twenty countries (Coalition to Stop ChAPter 4 NO PLACE TO HIDE Refugees,DisplacedPersons,andChildSoldierRecruits veraAchvarinaandSimonreich 56 verA AchvArinA And Simon reich the Use of Child Soldiers 2004, 13–17). A rough approximation of 300,000 is now clearly outdated and potentially underestimates the gravity of the current problem. Evidence drawn from individual conflicts since 2002 suggests that new wars are often characterized by an extensive use of child soldiers.4 This growing use of child soldiers flies in the face of the claim that international norms and laws are exerting an increasing influence on the behavior of state and nonstate actors (Bell 2002; Finnemore 1996, 158; Jepperson, Wendt, and Katzenstein 1996, 45). Indeed, a plethora of global protocols, agreements, and declarations attempting to protect children from both forced and voluntary recruitment have been flagrantly ignored since the end of the cold war.5 The historical taboo against the use of child soldiers thus seems to have decisively broken down and the problem has become geographically widespread (Singer 2005, 15, 38). With the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda as an extreme illustration of the problem,6 child soldiers have become a principal component of military forces across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and are playing an increasing strategically important role in the Middle East (UNICEF 2002a, 8). It is tempting to assume that this numeric growth is a product of the breakdown of state control: that rebel forces, not states, recruit child soldiers. The evidence drawn from African cases is far more ambiguous. Our data for the Liberian conflict of 1989–1995 does indicate an overwhelming proportion of child soldiers among the ranks of rebels and not the state’s military, but other conflicts demonstrate a contrary trend toward a larger use of child soldiers by governments. The second Liberian conflict of 1999–2003, for example, had a 70/30 split between rebel and government forces.7 The Sudanese civil war of 1993–2002 had a 64/36 split between rebel and governmental forces, but that majoritywasreversedtoa24(rebel)and76(government)distributionby2004 (CNN.com 2001; Save the Children, n.d.; CSUCS 2004a). The data we compiled for the Angolan conflict, although not definitive, suggest that children have made up between 24 and 33 percent of the government’s forces since the war against the rebels began in 1996.8 In that case, abduction has been a major method of recruitment, with both sides estimated to have seized forty thousand children in total by 2003.9 In considering the underlying causes of child soldiering, we examine nineteen cases drawn from African conflicts over the last three decades. Since 1975, Africa has become the epicenter of the problem, providing the largest concentration of both conflicts and child soldiers. By the late 1990s, fourteen out of the forty then ongoing or recently concluded armed conflicts in Africa included significant numbers of child soldiers.10 Estimates suggest that 120,000 children , 40 percent of all child soldiers, were soldiering in Africa at the beginning of the twenty-first century (CSUCS 2000; Twum-Danso 2003). East Asia and the Pacific ranked a distant second, with approximately 75,000 child soldiers no PlAce To hide...