'The Little Ones': The Making and Unmaking of Child Soldiers

There is a reason your childhood years are referred to as ‘formative’. We do not come into this world with well-formed personalities or moral structures. That which we come to know as right and wrong, we learn from our environments, friends, and, first and foremost, our parents. It is not a quick process and it is in development until we are adults. We start with a blank slate and the genetic footprint of our parents’ genes. As we all know, children can be remarkably cruel and remarkably kind without fully knowing what either condition is. They are testing out their moral legs, seeing what is acceptable and what is not. Children are not moral or immoral, they start off amoral. This is why when they are stolen from their families and forced into an environment killing and survival they often make the most ruthless of soldiers.

There are around 250,000 child soldiers used in combat zones all over the World, but never so prominently as in Africa. After 30 years of war and over two million lives lost, the Sudanese government has come to a peace agreement with the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army in the south of the country. Under pressure from the United Nations the SPLA has agreed to free its child soldiers. The children of Southern Sudan are coming home. Expectantly, there have been many problems. Many of the children have fled their villages to return to the barracks from which they fought, others have killed people in their communities. Once these children have been transformed into amoral killing machines, the job of re-integrating them back to the homes is a long and difficult task.

The process of making a child soldier occurs in what sociologist Erving Goffman called a ‘total institution’. Western examples that use such institutions in forming their members include the military, the police, and the prison system. In such places, the world to which the trainees are exposed is a world in which they have no control over their lives. Time and the sequence of indoctrination periods is controlled by the authorities. All trainees are made to look alike. Uniforms are used in this function. Exact obedience to the rules is enforced with severe consequences. Work and discipline are used to exhaust the trainees. In the case of child soldiers, brutality can be added to the list. Extremist cults use the same set of rules. The goal is to break down the individual personality of the trainee until you have a blank slate on which the new collective identity of the institution can be written. When doing this with adults, the authorities have difficulties. Adults have well-formed personalities and morals that need to be broken down or altered. The case with child soldiers is different. Children are only in the process of learning when they are kidnapped from their parents and brought to camps to learn the profession of killing. They are already blank slates and they learn and adapt quicker than adults. They are taught to see their fellow child inductees as brothers and the authorities as ‘older brothers’ who will protect them from the brutality, feed them, clothe them, and teach them new things. There are harsh punishments for those who would flee or disobey. They are rewarded when they obey and beaten or killed when they do not.

As the ultimate survivors, children adapt to this environment and take to learning such new skills as weapon cleaning; disassembly and reassembly; and target practice very quickly. The late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who spent years in Africa observing conflicts, remarked that some of the children’s early ideas remain with them. Adults, he noted, knew to fire at the enemy from well-covered positions. Children are less informed about the sheer danger of a firefight and the wide variety of firearms used can come across as toys. The children charge headlong into battle without fear. Many are used as cannon fodder. Those who survive and learn quickly become excellent soldiers. Romeo Dallaire, who has an active role in advocacy for child soldiers’ rights, has said that the young fighters who take to their roles and survive are capable of complex military action. This includes leading adults in attacks, reorganizing for counterattacks, and carrying out ambushes.

Child soldiers have little capacity to understand the gravity and magnitude of killing someone. Their moral understanding of the world was interrupted and reformed in an inescapable cult setting. Sadly, many of the worst and bloodiest massacres in the Rwandan war were carried out by these children, as their ‘older brothers’ cheered them on. Without a well-formed sense of empathy and mercy and with a well-formed sense of the importance of killing for the cause, these soldiers are ruthless in their killing efficiency. Africa’s countless wars and warring factions have made horribly pragmatic use of this fact.

The children are spending their formative years in combat; killing or avoiding being killed. They become creatures of war instead of just soldiers. Thus, when the conflicts end and efforts are made to reintegrate them back with their home communities and parents, severe problems arise. They have known only a family of violence where their ‘older brothers’ kept them alive and fed. When coming back to peaceful communities that they have not seen for years, they are coming back to alien worlds. Many simply flee back to the barracks of the armed groups. Others are violent and anti-social in their dealings with civilian life. These children have been taught problem-solving skills in an insulated environment. The essence of these skills: that killing will solve their problems. Murders have been committed by these returnees. They are simply doing what they know best in the hopes of solving problems. Re-integration is a slow and painful process in which the children must re-learn everything. Right and wrong must be taught again. But the years in which empathy may have been infused into their characters with ease are gone. They were stolen. The United Nations and various NGOs are involved with these efforts to repatriate the children. Their success rate is limited. More intensive support is desperately needed.

The use of child soldiers is an atrocity as great as the killings that these children carry out. They are taken from the love of their parents and transformed into something less than human. When we tally up the dead and mutilated from these conflicts it stretches far into the millions and we are appalled. When faced with the child soldiers we are face with dead souls. They have undergone a living death in the cauldron of war. In the war in the Congo (often called “Africa’s first World War” due to its size and the various countries fighting) child soldiers were used extensively. They were called ‘Kadogos’ meaning ‘Little Ones’. The use of such a term of endearment is a horrible irony. How many children die on the field of battle and how many more die only to continue to live?