Johannesburg — Three hundred thousand children, some as young as seven and eight, are fighting in conflicts in forty-one countries around the world and more than a third of them are in Africa.
The revelations come in a global report released Tuesday in Johannesburg by the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. The study documents military recruitment by government armed forces, paramilitaries and rebel and militia groups.
The authors chose South Africa as a role model to launch their findings, because youngsters cannot be recruited into the SA National Defence Force until they are eighteen.
But the record in other parts of the continent is lamentable. Minors continue to be recruited because of "their very qualities as children - they can be cheap, expendable and easier to condition into fearless killing and unthinking obedience," the report said. Child soldiers are often fed drugs to suppress their fear.
Less than three years ago, the Coalition reported the exploitation of child soldiers in about thirty countries. That figure has jumped to forty-one, said the spokeswoman, Judit Arenas, on Tuesday at a Johannesburg news conference, though the number of child combatants has remained constant. More than one hundred thousand under-age soldiers are under arms in Africa.
Children are used as frontline fighters, spies, porters, guards and minesweepers. They also become sex slaves in combat zones. Arenas said "Every child with an AK-47, however small they are, as long as they can hold up that weapon, is turned into an effective killer". Her colleague, Rory Mungoven, the Coalition's international coordinator, noted that the widespread availability of modern, lightweight weapons had greatly contributed to the child soldier problem.
Arenas added that children were forced to guard lucrative oil and diamond fields that rebels, and even government forces, in Africa use to finance their wars. "It's a problem that's being affected by conflicts which are intensified by interests over minerals... children are actually being kidnapped from other regions and countries, where there are no conflicts actually taking place. It affects the whole of Africa. It's not just those countries which are currently at war".
The report cites Angola, Burundi, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda among the countries with the worst records in the world for using children as fighters in recent years.
Children between seven and fourteen account for up to thirty percent of pro-government Kamajor militia groups in some areas of Sierra Leone. In the past decade, more than five thousand minors are reported to have fought behind both government and rebel lines in the civil war in Sierra Leone.
The report said the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda "abducted children from their schools, communities and homes to camps in Sudan, forcing them to commit atrocities and become sexual slaves". The testimony of Odur Leko, a fourteen year-old who was abducted by the LRA when he was eight, was quoted in the report: "At a camp, we were trained to use guns. Those who disobeyed had their ears and fingers cut off. I didn't want to participate in the killing, but they threatened to shoot me if I refused to do it," he said.
Military 'schools' in Rwanda and Burundi have served as centres to recruit tens of thousands of under-age youngsters. Arenas told reporters that, in recent months, the Angolan rebel UNITA movement had stepped up the forcible recruitment of children in its battle against government forces.
More than three hundred children worldwide were known to have died in combat in 1999 and 2000, said Arenas; but she acknowledged that the figure could be much higher, because no reliable documentation existed on battlefield child casualties.
In the past year, eighty countries have signed a new United Nations' treaty barring the use of children in armed conflict. Only five have ratified it. The Coalition is hoping to help curb the exploitation of child combatants, by supporting the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This protocol calls on governments to raise the minimum age, from fifteen to eighteen, for compulsory recruitment into armed forces and before troops are allowed to enter into direct combat.
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"We want the whole world to be a child soldier-free zone" said Judit Arenas.
The Coalition's 450-page survey also found widespread use of child fighters in conflicts across Asia. The United Kingdom too was criticised as the only European country to send 17 year-olds to war. "Britain routinely insists on deploying troops before the age of 18, " said Arenas.
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers is based in London and includes watchdog groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights' Watch and World Vision International.
