120,000 children will fight another day of war today

Every day 120,000 children under the age of 18 take up weapons for yet another day of war in Africa. As civil and regional conflicts increasingly proliferate across the continent, the old adage that non-combatants are the principal victims of war is twistedly borne out as thousands of children are sucked into the violence.

Many are no more than seven or eight years of age. The wars, largely unreported in the western media, have often dragged on for decades. The available pool of adult males decreases with each year of killing, and armies invariably look to the children for their fodder.

From a particularly warped viewpoint, children can make good soldiers. Over the last few decades small arms have become ever lighter, more efficient, and so manageable for a child to use. But the real fillip for under-manned armies is their potential for indoctrination. They can be brutalised into complete obedience, and so turned into killing machines.

In Uganda the Lord's Resistance Army wages war against the government forces and civilians in the countryside. Notorious for the savagery of their atrocities, the LRA forces are reported to be 90 per cent children. Recruitment techniques have included forcing mothers and fathers to tell selected children to kill the rest of the family, including the parents, as the only way for any of the family to survive.

In Algeria, Angola, Burundi, CongoBrazzaville, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda, boys and girls are daily conscripted, abducted and press-ganged into the various struggles of their elders. Many of the children die before they ever touch an AK-47 or panga machete. The girls are taken as sex-slaves and continually raped.

The very youngest recruits are often worked to death like pack-animals, carrying weapons and provisions. Alternatively, they are sent out to clear a way for the soldiers through the ubiquitous minefields by the trial and error of dismemberment and an agonising death.

Jorge and his brother Enrique (their names have been changed for this article) are typical of former child soldiers. Now 15 and 18, they were abducted in 1991 by the armed Mozambican opposition group, Renamo.

On the way to their family's hut they chatter in the back of the car and laughingly jolt with the rest of us over the muddy, rutted track. Their mother remonstrates with them over the volume of their high jinks.

Later, after the sort of familiarity that is born of a bumpy ride in the Mozambican bush, they speak of their experiences during the civil war.

Their tone changes, voices harden and rise, hands jabbing with their words. "It was hard for us. We had to kill many men. People were sick. We had to eat human meat in the jungle."

As they speak their eyes lock with a gaze so direct, so hard, so old beyond their years that it is almost impossible to imagine the horrors they describe. Behind all their anger, and outrage that the Mozambique government intends to conscript them for national service, they seem profoundly damaged. They will always be scarred by the trauma of what they saw and did.

However, it is not just an African problem. Children are being forced into armed conflicts throughout the world. According to Swedish Save the Children, under-18s are participating in 36 armed conflicts around the globe, with under-15s in 28 countries. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia have been known to recruit five-year-olds.

Things may be about to change. The Geneva-based Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers has initiated a massive, global campaign for the adoption of a protocol to ban the deployment of any soldiers under the age of 18. The charities have decided to embark on a wider campaign to pressure recalcitrant governments into adopting the protocol. The campaign is being co-ordinated by many influential figures from the phenomenally-successful fight to ban landmines.

A conference last April in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, brought together over 250 delegates from African NGOs and governments.

Further conferences are planned for Latin America, Europe and Asia over the next 12 months.

Ironically, most of the African governments have very progressive laws with regard to child soldiers. The problem lies in translating theory into practice, and developing a sense of urgency and political will for the implementation of the legislation.

Most participants cited the US and the UK as the greatest obstacles to the adoption of the Optional Protocol. Both states vigorously oppose 18 being the minimum age, as they actively recruit from 16 in the UK and 17 in the US.

However, in a time of low unemployment the military establishments in both states are finding it hard to attract new soldiers, and are loath to end the recruiting officers' visits to schools. In Ireland, the coalition is campaigning in tandem with Pax Christi International.

Further information from: Pax Christi Centre, 52 Lower Rathmines Road, Dublin 6, Tel: 01 496 5293, and Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 11-13 Chemin des Animones 1219 Chatelaine, Switzerland; phone: 0041-22 917 8169