Ex-Child Soldiers Appeal for End to Recruitment

They tote machine guns more than half their size, and they kill people more than twice their age. They see themselves as soldiers, not children.

They often die in combat before they reach adulthood--and if they do survive, they do not readily adapt to civilian life.

“Our childhood has been taken away from us, and none of you can give that back,” China Keiletsi, a Ugandan who served as a rebel soldier from age 9 to 20, told a group of U.N. officials and children’s rights activists here Tuesday.

“But I hope that everyone in this room will work to make sure that no other child in this world should go through that,” Keiletsi, now 25, said after describing a life of abduction, carnage, numbing brutalization and unquestioning obedience. “I beg you.”

For decades, from West Africa to Central America to Southeast Asia, adolescents and even preteens have been pressed into military duty by government and guerrilla forces alike.

But the United Nations--with broad new support from the major powers here--is now seeking to enforce a worldwide ban on the use and recruitment of child soldiers.

“For far too long, the use of child soldiers has been seen as merely regrettable,” said Kofi Annan, the U.N. secretary-general, addressing the gathering Tuesday. “We are here to ensure it is recognized as intolerable. Even on the battlefield, there are minimal norms of conduct that must be upheld.”

Several international treaties prohibit sending minors into combat, but the provisions have rarely been enforced. At least 300,000 combatants younger than 18 are fighting in armed conflicts around the world, U.N. agencies estimate.

The Security Council has asked Annan to submit a list in October of any known violators of these prohibitions.

Under the rules governing the new International Criminal Court, anyone who sends children younger than 15 into combat faces possible prosecution for war crimes, U.N. officials said Tuesday.

“We are here to put parties to conflict on notice that the use of child combatants will carry consequences,” Annan said.

With about 60 prime ministers and heads of state scheduled to gather here today for a special General Assembly meeting on children’s issues, the U.N. is also trying to increase support--and funding--for its rehabilitation programs for newly surrendered and disarmed child soldiers. In pilot projects in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone and Congo, thousands of young ex-combatants are now in these “demobilization camps,” which offer schooling as well as psychological therapy.

“It becomes a normal thing--killing someone was as easy as doing anything,” said Ishmael Beah, a 20-year-old from Sierra Leone who was forced to serve as a rebel soldier for three of his teenage years. After eight months in a U.N. rehabilitation program, Beah, now a charming, effortlessly eloquent young man, said, he was able to resume classroom studies. But he still suffers from nightmares and wrestles with a deep sense of guilt. “I was killing someone else’s parents,” he said.

Because underage soldiers are impressionable and obedient, they have been responsible for “some of the very worst wartime atrocities” in recent years, said Olara A. Otunnu, a senior U.N. official specializing in the problems facing children in armed conflicts.

Since 1999, Otunnu has traveled to war zones seeking pledges from governments and rebel groups that they will no longer send anyone younger than 18 into combat. He says he has now received 59 such commitments, many in sub-Saharan Africa, where the problem is most acute.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where thousands of young boys have fought as insurgents and as government troops in recent years, President Joseph Kabila and leaders of the opposition Congo Liberation Movement pledged a year ago to immediately halt the recruitment of child soldiers. They also agreed to permit U.N. inspections of military camps to ensure compliance and promised that armed minors would be transferred to U.N. facilities for former child soldiers.

But reports persist of young boys and girls fighting on both sides in Congo. And thousands of children abducted from northern Uganda are now in rebel camps across the border in Sudan, Otunnu said Tuesday.

In Angola, where Otunnu is headed next week, the army and the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola both have young teenagers in arms, he said.

If these practices do not cease, Otunnu said, “we will work to ensure that the very first prosecutions in the International Criminal Court are of those who recruit these child soldiers.”