THE BOY SOLDIERS OF SIERRA LEONE

The military use of children takes three distinct forms: children can take direct part in hostilities (child soldiers), or they can be used in support roles such as porters, spies, messengers, look outs; or they can be used for political advantage either as human shields or in propaganda.  Throughout history and in many cultures, children have been extensively involved in military campaigns even when such practices were against cultural morals. Since the 1970s, a number of international conventions have come into effect that try to limit the participation of children in armed conflicts, nevertheless the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers reports that the use of children in military forces, and the active participation of children in armed conflicts is widespread.

Thousands of children were recruited and used by all sides during Sierra Leone’s conflict (1993–2002), including the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and the pro-government Civil Defense Forces (CDF). Children were often forcibly recruited, given drugs and used to commit atrocities. Thousands of girls were also recruited as soldiers and often subjected to sexual exploitation. Many of the children were survivors of village attacks, while others were found abandoned. They were used for patrol purposes, attacking villages, and guarding workers in the diamond fields. In his book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Child Soldier, Ishmael Beah chronicles his life during the conflict in Sierra Leone.  In June 2007, the Special Court for Sierra Leone found three accused men from the rebel Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, including the recruitment of children under the age of 15 years into the armed forces. With this, the Special Court became the first-ever UN backed tribunal to deliver a guilty verdict for the military conscription of children. 

The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was a rebel army that fought a failed eleven-year war in Sierra Leone, starting in 1991 and ending in 2002. It later developed into a political party, which existed until 2007. The three most senior surviving leaders, Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon and Augustine Gbao, were convicted in February 2009 of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Child soldiers were heavily recruited in the Sierra Leone Civil War; a total of 11,000 are thought to have participated in the conflict.   Most were used for attacks on villages and on guard duty at diamond fields as well as guarding weapons stockpiles. Today, about 2000 are still left serving in the military of Sierra Leone.  The RUF made extensive use of child soldiers, using horrific methods to numb their new recruits to barbarity.  Thousands of abducted boys and girls were forced to serve as soldiers or as prostitutes, and those chosen to be fighters were sometimes forced to murder their parents. Guerrillas frequently carved the initials "RUF" on their chests, and officers reportedly rubbed cocaine into open cuts on their troops to make them maniacal and fearless.  For entertainment, some soldiers would bet on the sex of an unborn baby and then slice open a woman's womb to determine the winner.  The RUF abducted children aged 7 to 12, but were known to take children as young as 5 years old. The children were notoriously known by captains and civilians for their unquestionable obedience and enormous cruelty.  RUF forces have also abducted children to carry loads of looted goods and military equipment for them, and have abducted girls for the purpose of rape. Fifteen-year-old "Musa" (not his real name) was abducted from Port Loko during an RUF attack in mid-May, and forced to carry a heavy bag of salt for four days. He told Human Rights Watch that the rebels shot and killed his brother, twenty-year-old Lamina K., after Lamina complained that his load was too heavy. Musa showed Human Rights Watch a large bump on his head which he had sustained when he was beat by the RUF with rifle butts.  

SOME STORIES:

Seventeen-year-old "Abubakar" (not his real name) told Human Rights Watch that he had gone to a camp for demobilized RUF child soldiers in Makeni in March 2000 after fighting as a child soldier in the RUF for four years. He described how the RUF regularly came to the demobilization camp to pressure children to return to the RUF, telling the children that they would be sold when they left the camp, or stating that the RUF had located their families and would help them reunite. On at least one occasion, RUF fighters came to the camp and told the children that the RUF would kill everyone in the camp if they did not rejoin the rebel army. Abubakar estimated that the RUF took at least fifty children out of the camp through the use of threats, false promises, and false rumors.  When fighting broke out in early May, Abubakar was forced to rejoin the RUF when he was abducted while walking near the demobilization camp in Makeni. "It was not my wish to go fight, it was because they captured me and forced me," he told Human Rights Watch, "There was no use in arguing with them, because in the RUF if you argue with any commander they will kill you." Abubakar took part in recent fighting in Lunsar, Rogberi Junction, and Waterloo. He and others were often forced to commit abuses. In Rogberi Junction, their commander ordered them to burn down the entire town after a counterattack on the RUF by government helicopters. RUF commanders also used looted U.N. vehicles to move looted civilian properties back to RUF bases. Abubakar finally managed to sneak away from the RUF and return to the demobilization camp, which was evacuated to Freetown soon after. On their way to Freetown, the large group of demobilized child combatants was harassed by the pro-government Kamajor militia as well as by the Sierra Leone Army (SLA), who beat them. Abubakar said the Kamajors got angry with the children for showing them demobilization documents, saying that the children were provoking them because it was known that Kamajors were not educated and could not read.  

Fifteen-year-old "Foday" (not his real name) was abducted by RUF when he was eight years old and had gone to the Makeni demobilization camp after the Lomé peace accord. He told Human Rights Watch further details of the evacuation of the Makeni demobilized child soldier camp on May 23. He also said that RUF commanders regularly came to the camp to threaten and scare former child combatants into rejoining the RUF, and explained that the camp was evacuated early in the morning of May 23 because of fear that the RUF would attempt a mass abduction. On their way to Freetown, the eighty-six former child soldiers who left the camp were stopped by RUF and stripped of their possessions: Foday lost a new watch, his clothes, a radio, and some money. The RUF then forced Foday to join them to carry looted goods back to an RUF camp located twenty-seven miles away. He later managed to escape from the RUF, but was then harassed and beaten by Kamajors, who took away his remaining possessions and threatened to kill him until a commander intervened and stopped the abuse.  

  

Rape of captured women and girls is routine. Twenty-year-old "Miriam" (not her real name), still nursing her five-month-old baby, was raped in front of her husband almost as soon as they were captured near Masiaka on May 21. She told Human Rights Watch that she was raped almost continuously by seven RUF fighters, including some as young as fourteen, over the next three days. Some of the girls raped after capture are very young. "Malikah," who told Human Rights Watch that she was ten but looked much younger, told Human Rights Watch that she was raped by an RUF rebel after being captured, and watched her twenty- year-old sister Mawa Kamara die after RUF rebels amputated both her hands and one foot.  

As a teenager in war-ravaged Sierra Leone, Ishmael Beah was brainwashed, drugged and forced to kill.  "We went from children who were afraid of gunshots to now children who were gunshots," says Beah who became separated from his family at just 12 years old when his town was attacked.  He says his family were later killed in the country's vicious civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002.  During this period rebel groups like the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) who were notorious for hacking off limbs and indoctrinating children into their struggle fought government forces and their offshoots for control of the diamond rich West African state.  Desperate for help, Beah says he wandered the countryside with a group of other children who had lost their families in similar circumstances.  They managed to avoid the roaming RUF rebels but witnessed gunfights, ransacked villages and countless dead bodies along the way.  "I saw a man carrying his son that had been shot dead, but he was trying to run with him to the hospital," Beah recalls.

Eventually Beah and his friends came across a rural camp they initially believed to be an army base.  They soon realized however that they had in fact stumbled upon a battalion of breakaway Sierra Leonean soldiers. The splinter group opposed the RUF but were pursuing similarly vicious fighting tactics, including the deployment of child soldiers. Beah was taken in, given shelter and eventually trained to kill.  "Somebody being shot in front of you, or you yourself shooting somebody became just like drinking a glass of water. Children who refused to fight, kill or showed any weakness were ruthlessly dealt with.  "Emotions weren't allowed," he continued. "For example a nine-year-old boy cried because they missed their mother and they were shot," he says of the era which was portrayed in the 2006 Hollywood film "Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou.

Speaking about the moment he became separated from his family, Beah recalls: "I had gone to a talent show, I was interested in American hip-hop music, with my older brother, to another town and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful."  Now a U.N. goodwill ambassador, a law graduate and a best-selling author, Beah is heading the fight to publicize the plight of child soldiers in Africa.  "I do work with UNICEF to go to some of these places, but also to meet the young people who are coming from these experiences to reassure them that it is possible to come out of this," he says.  "I can speak to these children. With proper integration this is the way you can have a successful removal of children from armed groups"  Beah says he now has a greater understanding as to why children are viewed as such valuable fighting assets to groups like the RUF across Africa.  According to the United Nations there remains an estimated 300,000 children involved in conflicts around the world today.  "Everybody always asks why do they go after children? Because you can easily manipulate them," he says.  "They also want to belong to something, especially if they live in a society that has collapsed completely. Their communities are broken down, they want to belong to anything slightly organized and these groups become that.  "Somebody being shot in front of you, or you yourself shooting somebody became just like drinking a glass of water.  Beah felt this acceptance in his division of child soldiers and fought with the group for two years before eventually being rescued by UNICEF.

He was taken to a rehab center in the Sierra Leone capital, Freetown, where he spent eight months learning about what happened to him and readjusting to life after the war.  Those who worked at the center were frequently attacked by child soldiers finding it difficult to adapt to their new surroundings in the early days.  "We were very angry. We were very destructive. We destroyed the center where we were staying at (and) we burned some things up," he says of his early months there.  "We beat up the staff members. They came back, we beat them up some more."  With time, and the patience of a carer named Nurse Esther, however, Beah says he was eventually able to reconnect to his lost childhood and remember the person he once was.  He also credits the hip-hop music he loved as an innocent 12-year-old and the songs of Bob Marley as a major help in his recovery.

Beah's progress was so impressive that in 1996 he was selected to go to the United Nations and speak to a conference led by Graca Machel, Nelson Mandela's wife, on the plight of child soldiers.  It was during this trip that he would meet Laura Sims -- a UNICEF worker who would eventually adopt him and bring him to America when the conflict in Sierra Leone escalated to engulf Freetown in 1998.  Upon moving to the U.S., Beah enrolled at the United Nations school in New York before going on to graduate in 2004 with a degree in Political Science from Oberlin College in Ohio.  During his studies he also wrote a book on his experiences as a youth in Sierra Leone, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier".  "I finished this book before I graduated. I never intended to publish it but the idea for writing it was really this desire to just find a way to give the human context that was missing in the way the issue of child soldiers were discussed," he says.  His passion for bringing a greater understanding to the experiences of child soldiers has since led Beah to his current role as a U.N. ambassador for children affected by war.  And he hopes to offer the same support to today's child soldiers as Nurse Esther and the staff at the Freetown rehab center offered him.  "I witness UNICEF workers doing all of this and when these children were removed I felt their confusion," he says.  "I've been in that place before. All of a sudden you no longer have your military gear, you're now a kid."  "What I'm saying to them is that everybody has the capacity to find their own talent with the right opportunities to do something more with their lives, and everybody can walk their own path."

I can’t even comprehend all that information and when I was searching the web for information and stories there was so much on this particular subject, it was frightening and to think there are still child soldiers today is just crazy town.  Imagine your young children with a gun in their hand and high on drugs and raping boys and girls.  It is stuff that is for the movies but unfortunately was real life.

Imagine.