After the council, we went and dug his grave. Then we brought him to the side of the grave. He closed his eyes, and I shot him in the head. I had never executed anyone before, but this time I had to do it. If you don't do it, they'll kill you. Children recruited by paramilitary and guerilla groups are trained to treat their enemy's fighters and sympathizers without mercy. As a result children witness and participate in grave violations of human rights including torture and killings.
Commanders often use these instances to initiate and implicate children in violence. Many child soldiers expressed fear of being executed if they did not comply with orders. At 13, Laidy, recruited by paramilitary forces, shot a policeman in the head.
I wanted to please the commanders. Because if you say no, they'll kill you. Separated from their families and believing they will never be released or escape, many child recruits believe they have no choice but to prove their loyalty to their commanders and fellow combatants by participating in killings and other grave abuses.
Many children were recruited into armed groups and government forces during the conflict in Liberia. Some children saw their parents killed and believed they had no options but to join armed groups for safety or survival. Some were forcibly recruited. Some joined because of starvation so they would be fed by a warring faction. Child soldiers and their counselors told Human Rights Watch that children were frequently severely mistreated by the warring factions.
They treated me very bad. They didn't take care of me. They beat me with a cartridge belt if I put my gun down. The kids got very harsh treatment. First of all, boys from both factions have told us that there were initiation procedures when they joined in which they were forced to kill or rape someone or perform some other atrocity, like throwing someone down a well, or into a river.
This was supposed to demonstrate that they were brave enough to be soldiers. Anyway, they were told that they would be shot if they didn't do it. Then many of them have told us that they were beaten if they spoke up and were threatened with torture as punishment for doing something they weren't supposed to do.
The factions use a kind of torture called "tabay," in which a person's elbows are tied together behind his back, and the rope is pulled tighter and tighter until his rib cage separates.
This was a form of punishment that was used with child soldiers, too. Kids have told us that they were actually forced to witness the execution of members of their family or their friends. If they screamed or cried, they were killed. Boys have told us of being lined up to watch executions and being forced to applaud.
If you didn't applaud, you could be next. Some children were the most vicious, brutal fighters of all. I once saw a nine-year-old kill someone at a check-point. Children learn by imitation; they saw killings and then when their commanding officers ordered them to kill, they did.
Some of the kids killed out of fear; they were told they would be killed if they didn't carry out orders to kill. He said he was then told to kill a captured AFL soldier who was being beaten.
He refused. At knifepoint, he carried out the order. To discourage child recruits from surrendering, Maoist commanders informed children that they will be tortured if captured by the army. Child soldiers also fear violence to themselves or their families if they attempt to surrender. Eighteen-year-old Padma told Human Rights Watch that her superiors tried to discourage her from ever surrendering, warning her about the treatment she would receive from the Nepali army:.
The commanders told us never to surrender. They told us to throw the grenade that we had into the troops and run away. When I said that I wouldn't be able to do that, they said that the army would then arrest me, and if I surrender the army would torture and rape me.
When Padma and several other Maoists, including children, were followed by government forces after the battle of Tensen, the group sought shelter in a house in a village. Harried by government helicopters, their commanders first told them not to surrender and then essentially abandoned them:.
We were staying in the house with our commanders; they went out and started firing at the helicopter, and they also told the others to come out. Then, when the second helicopter arrived, the commanders just threw their weapons in the house and left. The commanders told us to run and not to surrender, but we said we would surrender to the army. During Sierra Leone's civil war, child combatants armed with pistols, rifles, and machetes actively participated in killings and massacres, severed the arms of other children, participated in rapes, and beat and humiliated elderly people.
Often under the influence of drugs, they were known and feared for their impetuosity, lack of control, and brutality. Human Rights Watch documented instances in which children recruited to the Revolutionary United Front RUF were compelled to commit abuses under threat of death or as a result of being drugged.
Abubakar, a 17 year old RUF child soldier demobilized in March was abducted outside the demobilization camp and forced to rejoin the RUF later that same year:. It was not my wish to go fight, it was because they captured me and forced me There was no use in arguing with them, because in the RUF if you argue with any commander they will kill you. Abubakar 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.
He finally managed to sneak away from the RUF and return to the demobilization camp, which was evacuated to Freetown soon after. The RUF frequently gave their fighters drugs, marijuana, and alcohol. Many witnesses believe that most of the group's atrocities were committed while fighters were under the influence of these substances.
Lynette, 16, was abducted and held by the rebels for several days during which time she was given drugs in her food, and witnessed other abductees being lined up and injected with drugs. She recounted:. From the first day they drugged us. They showed me some powder and said it was cocaine and was called brown-brown.
I saw them put it in the food and after eating I felt dizzy. I felt crazy. One day I saw a group of rebels bring out about 20 boys all abductees between 15 and 20 years old. They had them lined up under gunpoint and one by one called them forward to be injected in their arms with a needle. The boys begged them not to use needles but the rebels said it would give them power.
About 20 minutes later the boys started screaming like they were crazy and some of them even passed out. Two of the rebels instructed the boys to scream, "I want kill, I want kill" and gave a few of them kerosene to take with them on one of their burn house raids. Child abductees in the Lord's Resistance Army LRA are forced to beat and sometimes kill civilians in looting operations, participate in the abduction of new children, and steal from and burn houses in their home regions.
Children are forced to witness and to participate in the killings of other children, usually those who attempt to escape and are captured. In this paper, we define recruited children [23] based on the Paris Principles:. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities. Notably, the recruitment of children is an extremely serious crime that still involves approximately ,—, [25] children as victims worldwide.
Interviews with former CAAFG, who escaped or were liberated by the armies, reveal that participation in armed conflicts and witnessing killings, rapes, beheadings of civilians, bombings, and other forms of blatant violence constitute traumatizing experiences, thereby leaving physical and mental scars long after these children have terminated their participation.
This paper, in contrast, will first explain the factors of child recruitment for the two main sides involved in armed conflict, and then analytically describe the two elements common to both to understand the fundamental reasons for the widespread phenomenon in the country. The deployment of recruited children in armed conflict constitutes a global human rights crisis, in which global as well as regional human rights institutions and states have yet to focus on.
Indeed, the mobilization of children in armed conflict could generate a generation of society beset in violence, insecurity, and political instability. The next section reviews the relevant literature on CAAFG and the factors that have been found worldwide at the basis of the phenomenon.
The theory section discusses in more detail our theoretical arguments on child recruitment as well as the analytic approach, data sources, and methods used in our analysis. Next, the paper will be divided into two substantive sections of our empirical analysis on the causes of the participation of children in armed conflicts in Somalia. The first will review the different rationales for each side to the conflict to explain their use and recruitment of recruited children. The final section will present the conclusions of the article, where the findings will also be considered in the broader discussion of the international discourse of child recruitment and conflict studies.
We underscore that child recruitment in armed forces is prohibited under different domestic, regional, and international treaties and conventions, and that the recruitment of children in armed conflict constitutes a grave violation of human rights. Since the end of the Cold War, human rights have obtained increased international attention, but universal compliance remains a key challenge for all states. In recent years, human rights have been codified and institutionalized in domestic and international legal structures, and the number of related covenants and treaties has risen exponentially.
Certain countries, however, have witnessed a deterioration of human rights standards. On the other hand, others assert that, when analyzing human rights violations, it is necessary to consider the interdependence between domestic, regional, and transnational factors, which can be considered predominant causes for national political changes.
Instead, transnational and regional factors are important key elements that enable the academic, as well as the international debate, to discuss the role played by foreign aid, economic trade and political interventions in human rights abuses, especially in weak and small states. These elements are conceptually distinct from each other, yet they can co-exist in situations of conflict, and they usually overlap and mutually reinforce one another — thereby making the recruitment and use of children a persisting and evolving issue.
These factors can be categorized into four clusters of literature: domestic, material, ideational factors and inherent characteristics of children. In addition to these four categories, it is important to touch upon the academic debate on the international elements that affect the phenomenon. Notwithstanding the widespread adoption by states of relevant international treaties, it remains difficult to implement effectively such commitments in ways that could minimize the proliferation of recruited children.
Domestic factors pertain to those variables within a country, where child recruitment occurs. In this context, children often lack a stable education and viable alternatives and see the militias as their only way to provide for themselves and their families. Achvarina and Reich argue that it is an oversimplified motive since in some war zones children are not in any case willing to join an armed organization, even when their living conditions could drive them to do so.
Material causes include those elements that generate financial advantages to the rebel army that recruits children, or that are push factors facilitating the use of minors in militias.
For armed rebel groups, children are considered to be convenient, cheap, and expendable tools. Accordingly, children are viewed as having fewer material demands, as they are not paid as adults, do not need to be well-clothed or well-sheltered, and can be easily replaced.
In fact, children are frequently used for non-combatant roles such as guards, cooks, spies, carriers, sex slaves, etc. Some technological advancements in military weapons contributed to the widespread use of children in conflicts.
Rosen links the phenomenon of child recruitment to the trade of small, lightweight arms. Children can carry, deconstruct, and assemble these weapons easily with their smaller hands, thereby making those weapons easy to use during combat.
Children have not yet completely built their own identity and are still searching for a set of beliefs to adhere to and a community in which to belong. In contexts of conflict, it is easier for commanders and armed groups to indoctrinate boys and girls and push worldviews that frame war as a necessary mode for their individual and collective survival.
In Asian conflicts, indoctrination played an incisive role in the recruitment of children in armies due to the explicit political agenda of many militias. The programs consisted of parades and special events for children exhibiting war equipment, describing the abuse and suffering that minors were forced to live through, and showing speeches or movies about their fight for independence portraying them as heroes.
The last category of causal factors includes supposedly intrinsic features often attributed to children. Children are widely considered to be easily controlled, exploitable, and more responsive to threats and physical violence than adults, thereby making them pliable to orders.
The three main instruments employed by the international community to prevent and stop the practice have been sanctions, including travel bans, economic restrictions, and arms embargoes, directed to perpetrators of child recruitment. The aforementioned factors gather all the elements recognized as the main factors that facilitate the recruitment and mobilization of children in war.
Nevertheless, not all factors are found in countries where child recruitment is a practice; generally, each case has distinctive characteristics and the phenomenon can be more or less affected by a unique set of domestic, cultural, social, and political conditions. Among the factors discussed above, it is possible to find two elements that are particularly relevant for understanding the political logic of CAAFG in the Somali conflict. The next section elaborates the main theoretical arguments of this paper concerning recruited children.
Our core analytic objective inquires on the causes of the deployment of children as agents of war in contemporary Somalia. Nevertheless, only two elements appear to be applicable for both groups. First, the reasons for child recruitment and deployment differ for al-Shabaab and the Somalian government. The two sides and their associated militias generally employ children for different purposes and with different methods. This deficiency in information, together with the lack of methodical monitoring mechanisms that ensure minors are excluded from armed conflict, make it easy to keep children inside the troops.
Second, voluntary recruitment is found to be a shared feature, and two factors are common to both factions. First, children are recruited by the armed group or may join voluntarily, due to the lack of viable alternatives for means of survival. Many children in Somalia come from financially impoverished backgrounds or from villages that have been heavily devastated by a war.
Therefore, commanders persuade children through, often false, promises of money and other material benefits, and these children are consequently attracted by the idea of being able to provide for their families and acquire food, shelter, and a certain level of protection.
In addition, Somali children were born and raised in a persistent climate of insecurity and widespread violence, which motivated them to believe that war is the only feasible strategy to fight for their freedom, identity, and values, regardless of whether rebels or government forces help them fulfil a nationalistic sentiment that arises from wanting to protect their country and regions, and to take revenge for the recurring abuses perpetrated by the belligerents.
Table 2 shows the aforementioned differences between al-Shabaab and the government armies and highlights their shared features that will be further investigated in the analysis.
In this paper, we draw some theoretical perspectives from the literature on conflict studies, international law, and human rights scholarship. The dynamics between war, conflicts, and human rights are complex, prone to change, and contingent upon political, legal, socio-economic, and cultural factors.
Violations of human rights are frequently attributed as consequences of armed conflicts, which generate immense suffering for the community, undermine the dignity of individuals affected by violence, and the long-term detrimental consequences of armed conflict on socio-economic systems.
A shared notion when discussing child recruitment is that, although it is not a novel practice, it has notably increased during the 21st century. To answer the research puzzle, this article will make use of a single case study: child recruitment in Somalia and the involvement of all key actors engaged in the armed conflict. We cover key political developments in Somalia from to because this time frame corresponds to the rise of al-Shabaab and to the peak of the war.
This decade has seen a tremendous increase in the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict, yet, the phenomenon, in the Somali context, has been understudied in the scholarly literature. June 22, News Release. June 16, News Release. January 27, Witness.
November 30, Statement. June 29, Dispatches. May 25, Dispatches. February 7, Statement. January 31, Dispatches. May 24, Letter.
Report: Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights. Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights impeding the exercise of the rights of self-determination.
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