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When war becomes child's play

- March 3, 2009

Shelly Whitman is the deputy director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies.

The security detail stationed outside the hotel room carried AK-47s at their side. But the two guards protecting the peace negotiations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were hardly like any other soldiers.

They were no more than 14 years old.

“I remember that they asked me for cigarettes,” recalls Shelly Whitman, now deputy director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies. “I immediately took this stance with them where I explained that they shouldn’t be asking me that because I was a neutral facilitator. I went back to my room later and I realized that I wasn’t just saying ‘no’ to two kids, but to soldiers carrying AK-47s. And when I realized that they were working 24 hours straight, I wondered who was feeding them. Who was looking out for them? Where did they come from?”

When it comes to child soldiers, those questions are never easy to answer. Although the very idea is appalling to most people, children as young as five or six are being drafted into armed forces in as many as 30 countries. Experts estimate that there may be as many as 300,000 children around the world currently serving in government militaries and organized militias. Some “volunteer,” driven into ranks by endemic poverty and insecurity. Many are orphans of war, or are abducted from their communities and forced to take up arms.

Dr. Whitman was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2001 until 2003, serving as head of the research team for the Office of the Inter-Congolese Dialogue. At the peak of the country’s civil war in the late 1990s, an estimated 40,000 children were used as soldiers. As many as 7,000 still remained as of 2007, used by various factions as combatants, porters, guards and sex slaves.

Today, Dr. Whitman teaches a course on children and war as part of the International Development Studies (IDS) program, exploring why modern warfare in many parts of the world not only condones but encourages the use of child soldiers. No longer are they a resource of last resort, drawn upon when soldier ranks get low. Increasingly children are being used at the start of conflict because – disturbing as the idea may be – there are strategic advantages to doing so.

“General RomĂ©o Dallaire (commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda) has talked about children being used as a weapons system,” says Dr. Whitman. “In Sierra Leone, for example, the idea was to create suspicion that all children could potentially be soliders. You stay on edge because any child could be an enemy.”

“Traditional armed conflict between nation-states is increasingly being replaced by internal armed conflicts within countries,” adds Julie Breau, a political science master’s grad who now works with the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre. “Think about how using child soldiers tears apart a community. If your goal is to try and bring down a society, what better way to do it?”

Ms. Breau’s thesis research explored young women recruited into soldier ranks. “Much of the literature that’s out there still focuses on girls as sex slaves or in traditional gender roles,” she says. “But we now know that they often hold weapons and take part in combat. They also take on a number of other roles: messengers, cooks, spies. On rare occasions they can even have leadership roles within units.”

She explains that one of the more difficult circumstances for girl soldiers is if they become pregnant through rape or intercourse. “It makes things incredibly more complicated. They become limited in terms of how easily they can reintegrate into their old society, or they may choose to stay in their situation because of the shame they might receive in their communities.”

One of the biggest challenges in confronting the issue of child soldiers is that initiatives like disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programs are often short-term and designed for large groups. The experiences of individual child soldiers, however, may be incredibly different depending on the circumstances, their gender, their roles and the child’s ability to cope with traumatic experiences.

“I think you’ll find tremendous variability in how individuals adjust to the circumstances,” says Stan Kutcher, Sun Life Financial Chair in Adolescent Mental Health. “Some children will be able to adapt to their new status and take on the roles they need to survive within their new reality. Others will not be able to, and may attempt to flee, harm themselves or could become psychologically incapacitated and develop post-traumatic stress disorder. There’s a huge range.”

Helping confront these concerns are a growing number of international organizations and NGOs that work at establishing programs and rehabilitating communities torn apart by war. The international community is also starting to take greater steps to address child soldiers. The United Nations, for example, has established the Office of the Special Representative for Children in Armed Combat, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child contains protocols to prohibit governments and rebel groups from deploying children under the age of 18. But with limited enforcement options and significant resource issues, the effectiveness of these measures is still falling behind the reality on the ground in many countries.  

That’s why Canadian activists are generating attention for the issue. Beth Jean Evans, a master’s student in IDS, is president of the Dalhousie chapter of War Child Canada. “It’s a sensitive subject, but we need to draw more attention to children that are being denied their rights,” she says. “You have no empowerment when you’re eight or nine – you depend on your society for your security. And if the state is working to strip you of your rights, you become powerless.”

War Child Canada has established a marketing campaign entitled “Help Child Soldiers.” With provocative imagery and a twist of dark satire, it conveys the message that by ignoring the problem of child soldiers, people around the world are in effect condoning their use. The Dalhousie chapter plans to spend much of the winter term promoting the campaign around campus.

It’s not just students leading the charge. In October 2008, Dalhousie and the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies hosted a two-day Toolkit Development Workshop as part of the Child Soldiers Initiative. The workshop was to develop a best practice manual to assist humanitarian and peacekeeping missions in extracting child soldiers from armed groups. With the help of local experts from a variety of backgrounds, the workshop’s contributions will be used as part of an operational field guide produced by the Initiative in 2009.

“If everybody who is a parent thinks about their eight or nine year old in those circumstances, it would be unthinkable,” says Dr. Whitman. “Why is it unthinkable for us but okay in parts of the world that are more distant? We get resources from these parts of the world. What happens there affects us too. We can’t forget that.”