born
to kill born to die
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| SHEER
DESPAIR: this 7-year-old girl in Panama is one of the thousands of
children trapped as warrior in a war zone |
Children are being
used and abused as weapons of war in at least 20 countries including India,
the US, Israel, Myanmar and Colombia. They are firing guns and killing
people when they should be in school. They are dying in battlefields when
they should be playing. Charu Lata Hogg reports from
London
They
give you a gun and you have to kill the best friend you have. They do
it to see if they can trust you. If you don’t kill him, your friend
will be ordered to kill you. I had to do it because otherwise I would
have been killed. That’s why I got out. I couldn’t stand it
any longer.
A 17-year-old
boy, joined paramilitary group in Colombia, aged 7, when a street child
in 2003.
There was no one
in charge of the dormitories and on a nightly basis we were raped. The men
and youths would come into our dormitory in the dark and they would just
rape us. If we cried afterwards, we were beaten with hosepipes. We were
so scared that we did not report the rapes. The youngest girl in our group
was aged 11 and she was raped repeatedly in the base.
A 19-year-old girl, describing
her experience in the National Youth Service Training Program
in Zimbabwe, in 2003.
...other trainees
if they were caught trying to run away, their hands and feet were beaten
with a bamboo stick and then put in shackles and beaten and poked again
and again and then they were taken to the lock up.
A boy abducted at age
13 by government forces
in Myanmar, in 2003.
These are a few voices
among the hundreds of thousands of child soldiers who are bullied and
beaten into submission in at least 20 countries across the world, says
the Child Soldiers Global Report 2004 released recently by the London-based
Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, covering the period from
April 2001 to March 2004. The coalition is a grouping of human rights
organisations of formidable repute, which share and articulate their concerns
on a common cause.
The report is an eye-opener. Governments of nations, including the US,
Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Sudan, used children
on the frontlines in at least 10 conflicts. Others, such as Colombia,
Uganda and Zimbabwe, backed paramilitary groups and militias that used
child soldiers. Countries like Indonesia and Nepal used children as informants,
spies and messengers, and Western governments broke commitments to protect
children by providing military training and support to governments using
child soldiers, such as Rwanda and Uganda. Despite near universal condemnation,
the UN Security Council resolutions and international commitments, children
in conflict areas remain the most vulnerable target group for recruitment.
Almost a year back, I was hired as a research consultant by the organisation
to research and document child soldier use and recruitment in the context
of military legislation for 27 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. These
entries would at some point in the future become part of a 350-page global
report, the only compendium of its kind that has been reviewing trends
and developments since 2001 in 196 countries. A report that would slowly
make its way to the unsc and come under the glare of sharp media attention.
It was a formidable project. From Myanmar, which continued to recruit
thousands of children in its army, some as young as 12, to Afghanistan,
where as many as 8,000 boys, mostly aged between 14 and 18, had been disarmed
and released from factional militias but continued to live under a military
command structure – mapping the extent of this brutal practice was
daunting.
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