Meet the Lord's Resistance Army fighting (LRA) in Northern Uganda in the words of sixteen year old Susan.

“One boy tried to escape (from the rebels), but he was caught. His hands were tied, and they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I knew this boy. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me - so I did it.

The boy asked me why I was doing this to him. I said I had no choice. After we had killed him, they made us smear his blood on our arms. They said we had to do this so that we would not fear death and so we would not try to escape. The thought of this boy’s death haunts me. I see him in my dreams asking me why  I killed him for nothing.”

A Child Soldier

As many as 300,000 children have been used as soldiers around the globe with about 120,000 of these fighting in the numerous ragged and bitter battles across the African continent. For the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Kony- a “messiah’ who wants to seize power and rule the country according to the Ten Commandments, this has been routine.

The LRA’s pattern of children’s and human rights violation has continued at an unprecedented scale. Up to 8,000 boys and girls have been abducted to serve as fighters, camp workers and sex slaves. When not actively engaged in combat, children are used to man checkpoints while adult soldiers stand back several meters making the children the first targets in any shooting situation.

Amnesty International reported the case of a fourteen-year-old girl, named Concy who was abducted near Kitgum in Uganda and taken to Sudan by the LRA to be used as a sex slave.

“In Sudan, we were distributed to men and I was given to a man who had just killed his wife. I was not given a gun but I helped in the abduction and grabbing of food from the villagers. Girls who refused to become wives were killed in front of us to serve as a warning to the rest of us.”

In an article published in the Jan/Feb 1999 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist titled “the Kalshniov age,” Michael Klare says that the epoch of the violent child soldier reached its refined status on Christmas Eve of 1989 in Liberia. Charles Taylor had then marched in to Liberia at the head of a ragtag invasion force of some 150 amateur soldiers of the self styled National Patriotic Front, and set out to conquer the country. In the months that followed, Taylor seized control of the Liberian hinterland, exacting tribute from its inhabitants, recruiting additional soldiers and killing all that stood on his way. As many as 200, 000 people died in the upheaval and millions were driven from their homes.

Taylor had unleashed the most deadly combat system of modern time – the adolescent male equipped with an AK-47 assault rifle. This deadly system has been replicated with deadly consequences in more than a dozen countries producing a casualty rate normally associated with an all out war between modern and mechanized armies. Youngsters equipped primarily with AK-47s and other light military style weapons have become effective instruments of destruction, producing casualty rates in numbers never witnessed since the First World War where civilians constituted only about 5% of casualties. They constitute about 90% of all those killed or maimed in more recent wars. UNICEF and UNHCR estimate that in recent years, about 2 million children have been killed in armed conflict, 4.5 million disabled and another 12 million left homeless.

According to Human Rights Watch, all too often war becomes a permanent way of life for combatants whether they belong to government forces or insurgents. Lacking an education or training in other marketing skills, youngsters discover that soldiering is the only occupation for which they are equipped. In societies where food and shelter are scarce, membership in an armed band that preys on civilian societies is a plausible route to survival.

As armed conflict intensifies, social fabrics unravel and children increasingly see their rights severely eroded. They become lost or separated from their parents in the fighting. Without enough food to eat and no schools or other basic structures in place to meet their needs, they become particularly vulnerable to recruitment. There are instances where children beg incessantly to join the rebels, but there are also situations where their own desperate mothers take the children to the guerillas because their families live in misery.

While all these conflicts require a weak and unrepresentative government, a history of ethnic and social antagonism, widespread corruption and poverty, they also need one crucial element - the availability of light military style weapons. These weapons have attained this position of prominence because they are now cheap and easy to obtain, rugged and easy to use and with a few hours training a teenager can learn all they need to know in order to aim and fire into a crowd of people and inflict enormous damage. Most assault weapons fire hundreds of rounds per minute – allowing a handful of teenage combatants to spray a village square and kill or wound everybody in sight.

After years of uncontrolled small arms flow into the Great Lakes region of Eastern and Central Africa more than 2 million people – mostly civilians have been killed and over 6 million people have fled their homes. With the prevailing poverty in Africa, guns can be bartered for coffee, tea, gold, diamonds and other minerals. To fatten profit margins, the traffickers simultaneously smuggle in toxic waste, used clothing, imported beer and drugs.

Curbing the proliferation of small arms and light weapons must be a central feature to any conflict control and prevention strategy in these volatile areas. Choking off the supply of black market weapons and munitions to irregular forces might move us closer to the negotiating tables as well as curb the need for recruitment of children as combatants. Save for humanitarian agencies and human rights groups, few people seem to pay attention to the effects of dumping guns in Africa.

The children of the Congo and Northern Uganda like any other children in the world need peace. Public pressure can ensure that governments support programs that provide protection to children. Children are caught up in conflicts because of conscious and deliberate decisions by adults.

Nearly four hundred years ago, for beads, mirrors, muskets, lead balls and gun powder, African chiefs and kings sent millions of young people chained, screaming and kicking through the numerous doors of no return to human merchants.

Today for similar merchandize - guns, rocket launchers and other consumer accessories of glitter, warlords and chieftains are waging wars of attrition across the continent in the name of ideology, ego, proxy wars and the myth of protecting their people resulting in many young people howling and biting to leave the continent. They die by the boat loads in the Mediterranean, off the Atlantic coast and in the Sahara desert. Those who survive to live can’t get rid of the shakes  in desolate lives in foreign lands.
 
In the treacherous forests of the Congo where men are killing each other in poverty for unseen riches, they send the children off to the battlefield to kill. Those who survive cut notches on their young guns and in their young hearts.

By Onyango Oketch, Author and Performing Artist