Where Children Become Soldiers

Nora Mares, Communication and Information Management Service, DESA, New York

According to Amnesty International, approximately 250,000 children under the age of 18 are thought to fight in conflicts around the world, and hundreds of thousands more are members of armed forces who could be sent into combat at any time. Most child soldiers are between 15 and 18 years old, but significant recruitment starts at the age of 10 and the use of even younger children has been recorded, especially in Africa, where the situation is most critical. It is believed that since its foundation in 1987, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 20,000 children to use them as soldiers and sexual slaves.


Joseph Kony: the terror in Uganda

Joseph Kony is the principal LRA leader and one of the most wanted men in the world. In 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for him and four of his top commanders. The LRA started its activity in Northern Uganda and has been fighting against the country’s government in what has become one of the longest running armed conflicts in Africa.

Inside the LRA, as well as in all the other armed groups that recruit children, child soldiers are commonly subject to abuse and most of them witness death, torture and sexual violence. Many participate in killings and suffer serious long-term psychological damages. Girls are used as sexual slaves and many are forced to marry soldiers –Joseph Kony himself is famous for having 40 wives.

The LRA was started in the 1980’s by a woman called Alice Lauma, also known as Lakwena, a spirit medium who claimed that the Holy Spirit had spoken to her and ordered her to overthrow the Ugandan government for being unfair to the Acholi, an ethnic group in Northern Uganda. She founded the group known as the Holy Spirit Movement which first gained the support of the Acholi and other ethnic groups, but after failing in her mission several times Lakwena was exiled. With no remaining clear leader of the movement Joseph Kony took control, claiming to be Lakwena’s cousin. He transformed the Holy Spirit Movement’s rebel army into the LRA. The new armed group did not receive the same support from the Acholi people as the Holy Spirit Movement, so the rebels begun to abduct children. It is estimated that more than 90% of the LRA’s troops were abducted as children. According to UNICEF, the LRA has abducted more than 25,000 children since 1986 and only 5,000 have been reunited with their family after receiving basic medical care, psychosocial counselling and family-tracing support in reception centres.

Most of the children find social reinsertion almost impossible. They are the victims of their own psychological trauma and stigmatized by the rest of society. A former child soldier in Uganda, aged 13, told the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Solders of his ordeal. "Early on when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA men explained that all five brothers couldn’t serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my two younger brothers and forced us to watch. They beat them with sticks until they died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was nine years old.” The work done by social workers to assist these traumatized children is truly praiseworthy; their selflessness helps a child’s emotions to return to minds numbed by years of drilling and death. According to the UNICEF, nearly 1 million Ugandans are still displaced as a consequence of the violence and insecurity in the north, which constitutes one of the largest displaced populations in the world.

The situation now

The 2009 Report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict in Uganda shows that no military activity of the LRA has been reported on Ugandan territory since the signing of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement in August 2006 between the Government of Uganda and the rebel group. From the signing in June 2006 to March 2008, Northern Uganda experienced the longest period of peace since the beginning of the war, while the Government of Uganda and the LRA engaged in a series of negotiations to end the conflict, which are known as the Juba Peace Talks and were mediated by the Southern Sudanese Government. However when the signing of the Final Peace Agreement (FPA) should have taken place, in April 2008, Joseph Kony chose not to appear and his absence put a sharp end to the peace talks. The reason the rebel leader gave to the international community for not showing up were the International Criminal Court arrest warrants for him and four other LRA leaders.

The situation got worse when, in December 2008, joint operations by the Ugandans, Congolese and Southern Sudanese directed against the LRA failed to capture or kill the group's leaders. In response, the LRA has been ransacking towns, burning homes and killing civilians with guns, machetes and hammers.

The Secretary-General report shows that since the collapse of the peace talks, the rebel movement remains very active in the region. Violent incidents of killing and maiming of children, abductions, recruitment and grave sexual violence are regularly reported in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic and in southern Sudan.

After her visit to Sudan, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy spoke in a press conference on 25 November 2009 about the situation of the children there. “Despite the progress, I must say that of course there is a great deal of challenges that exist, there are still a large number of children that are associated with armed groups. I met LRA children. If you meet them you will be shocked. There is no light in their eyes due to years of abuse (…). These children talked to us of terrible abuses, sexual and other.”

Do date the Ugandan government has been unable to end the insurgency. With the conflict spilling over the borders into the neighbouring countries and the LRA’s recent move to South Sudan, there is a very real risk of more child abductions. The international community has a moral role to play, not only in deploying peacekeeping troops under UN mandate to ensure civil protection, but also in assisting legitimate governments in imposing regional stability.