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Child Soldiers and "Our Boys"

-- Ahilan Kadirgamar

"The leaders of the country don't help us, because they always want to give weapons; we, we want peace now. We, the young people of today, we want peace now. We want to inform ourselves, we don't want war… We are all children of the same country. The war isn't good. We want peace in Congo. The leaders should put their children on the front line, so that they will be destroyed. The weapons should be used to protect the nation, not to kill our brothers."

Pascal, Cong-Brazzaville (In Rachel Brett and Irma Specht, Young Soldiers)

These words of a boy soldier in Congo, also speak to the situation in the North and East of Sri Lanka and provoke crucial questions. Are the leaders' children on the frontlines? Do the young people of the North and East want war or peace? And even those who claim that weapons are necessary to protect the Tamil nation -- do they not see how these weapons have been used and continue to be used to kill in an internecine war in the East?

Rachel Brett and Irma Specht in their recent book Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight (2004 International Labour Organization) allow the child soldiers themselves to speak about how and why they end up fighting. It is a well-researched work based on numerous interviews with child soldiers around the world, including Sri Lanka. The many excerpts of interviews with former child soldiers help one to listen to their stories and learn about their tragic situation. Furthermore, the work points to social and economic factors that have led to the child soldier epidemic, and it recommends policy initiatives to confront what may be the most dangerous threat to a young generation's future.

The work looks first within a broader context, at the enabling factors that lead to the recruitment and use of child soldiers. First is, of course, the existence of war -- including the tendency towards militarized violence. If internal and international armed conflicts did not exist, then children would not join or be recruited into armed formations. War, particularly protracted war as in Sri Lanka -- with the corresponding militarization of society that destroys social institutions and risks civilians' safety, makes war the everyday background to their life. Poverty is the other factor that leads to youth becoming susceptible to be used in armed conflicts. This is also what we have seen in the North and East where it is the children of the poor that have been sacrificed. The lack of educational and employment opportunities, internally and externally induced stress on families, and the pull of friends are among other factors that are outlined as leading to children's vulnerability to being used as combatants. Next, the politics and ideology prevalent in the respective area is another factor, as they become the justification for fighting as well as recruitment. The LTTE has successfully used an arsenal of propaganda material, including film footage of fighting and Heroes Day celebrations to lure in possible recruits. Finally, the specific features relating to adolescents being a vulnerable age, and the influence of particular cultures and traditions -- in terms of the role it envisions for the youth -- are additional factors that contribute to the existence of child soldiers.

In addition to such long-term factors, there is a discussion of the immediate risks such as the outbreak of violence, lack of income, disruption of schools, difficult family events, peer pressure and recruitment drives. These push and pull factors, both of an immediate and long-term nature, work differently in each of those contexts, and in terms of gender for boys and girls. In the East we now face the immediate danger of re-recruitment for thousands of child soldiers who were released by the Rebel Commander Karuna. Such crisis situations require their own solutions of protection and rehabilitation. For a valuable discussion of the crisis in the East see the 'Also In Our Name' report by the Batticaloa Collective.

Finally, the work questions the notion of volunteering to become a combatant; by questioning the extent to which volunteering is actually voluntary in the context of different forms of coercion. Legal concerns are also relevant given the Optional Protocol and other international legal standards that have clearly stated that there is no room for "volunteer" child soldiers. Rachel Brett's in depth discussion within another paper should be of interest to those grappling with this question of volunteering as well as the "pull" and "push" factors that lead to the recruitment of child soldiers: 'Why do adolescents volunteer for armed forces or armed groups?' Paper for Spanish Red Cross International Conference "Adding Colour to Peace" (Valencia, Spain, 5-7 November 2003) (http://www.geneva.quno.info/pdf/Adolescent_Volunteers1.pdf)
The question of conscription and volunteer recruitment has also been part of the debate in Sri Lanka; to quote the recent Human Rights Commission's report at length: "They also point out that many of the recruitments are invisible, with families in the "uncleared" areas being requested to give one child in the family and if the child leaves, to replace that child with another. Child abduction/ recruitment, therefore, emerges as a serious problem for the eastern province. There is often a defense put forward that many of these children come voluntarily. Under international law, the issue of "voluntariness" is irrelevant. Children cannot be recruited into armed forces with or without their consent. It is the duty of all armed forces to release those children from a military environment. However, the stories that the mothers of these children tell the Commission as well as the other human rights groups, point to the fact that many of the recruitments are indeed abductions and that children are taken against their will." (http://www.lankademocracy.org/documents/batticaloa2003hrc_report.htm)

Now, while the research on a global level is useful in framing our perspective on the child soldier issue, we need to acknowledge the particular characteristics of the use of child soldiers in Sri Lanka to be able to confront it. There is all the more the need for the scrutiny of our particular context, as the situation of child combatants has steadily worsened in Sri Lanka despite increasing attention about the plight of child soldiers on a global level, including within the UN system. How has the situation historically deteriorated in Sri Lanka? Starting in the mid-eighties most militant groups did recruit youth into their ranks, but the fighting was not within the context of a conventional war. Through the nineties, as the LTTE became more of a conventional force, it increasingly recruited younger and younger children. As seen in other countries, child soldiers are easy to control, and they fight effectively with small arms. Furthermore, these child soldiers have been used as cannon fodder taking the first brunt by going protectively ahead of the more experienced and valuable armed formations. In the late nineties, the LTTE initiated policies of conscription requiring each family to contribute one child into its ranks. However, this policy has been enforced mostly among the poor, as the middle classes have managed to move away from the LTTE's reach or paid them off. Any notion of the political cause for which they are fighting or critical questioning were non-existent, as the battles have become the only concern of these children who are reduced to moving and thinking weapons.

Next, in parallel to the historical changes to child soldiering, we need to look at the genealogy of the concept of child soldiers in the Tamil community, because confronting child soldiering will require confronting its particular ideological justification within the Tamil community. In the Tamil community, the militants beginning in the late seventies and early eighties were called "our boys"; it gave them a certain agency as actors that were militant and committed to the Tamil community. Even to this day, particularly in the expatriate Tamil community, which is the least affected by the war and its corresponding impact on children, the LTTE cadres are called "our boys". This frozen concept "our boys" relates explicitly to the uncritical support for Tamil nationalism and LTTE's politics, as the expatriate community seems to be frozen in the moment it migrated to the West. It is that uncritical support which has also filled the coffers of the LTTE and provided it political support -- even in the face its grave human rights violations against the local Tamil populations.

However, the ordinary people in the North and East are more likely to refer to the LTTE cadres whom they relate to as "them" -- with all its oppressive connotations. Even the leaders of the Tamil militant movements have throughout the last twenty-five years been called "our boys." So powerful is the concept "our boys" that even flashing images of pot-bellied middle-aged LTTE leaders over the Tamil and international media have not questioned this concept. But for expatriate Tamils to call the child soldiers "our boys" begs the question as to how they can be "ours", as the real "our boys" are living in affluent settings in the West, while the children of the poor in the North and East are recruited to fight and die for the nationalist cause. Finally, "boys" does not do justice to the gender ratio of child soldiers, where close to forty percent of the child soldiers are girl soldiers. But then again, in the Tamil community, to think of "our girls" as fighting and leading is unacceptable. The attitude is more that those girls can fight and die, because they have no role in the community after the fighting is over.

Now, while the historical changes in the use of child soldiers and its ideological whitewash through the concept of "our boys" might be two factors to consider, the most important factor that perpetuates this child soldier tragedy in the North and East is power - specifically the LTTE's use of power for social control and repression. Until such repression is challenged -- both externally from outside the Tamil community (including by the international community), and internally from within the Tamil community -- the issue of child soldiers will not find a resolution. The LTTE's repressive power is characterized by not only its political killings that targets dissent, but also its control of the Tamil media and other forms of communication, its hijacking of social institutions and its international network of support. It is such totalitarian power that has provided the institutional and ideological infrastructure for it to recruit child soldiers with impunity. The waning or dismantling of such power is not only the pre-condition for the end to the use of child soldiers, but also, more generally, the possibility of demilitarization and democratization.

The processes for demobilization and re-integration are also complicated in a country that is far from a post-conflict situation, where the constant threat of war is in the air and a low intensity conflict has persisted in the form of political killings throughout the thirty months of ceasefire. However, when one listens to the words of the child soldiers in 'Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight' or when one listens to the more recent stories from the East in the 'Also In Our Name' report one is moved by the individual voices of these children, and drawn to act to save one life if that is all that one can do. It is such a demanding commitment that should be the guide to action for international organizations that are so prevalent in Sri Lanka, the government institutions with their obligations to its citizens and international laws, and civil society institutions committed to the people. Therefore, global perspectives on child soldiers or awareness of the broader ties of militarization to child soldiering in the Sri Lankan context should only strengthen our praxis at the local level to resist child recruitment. It is such local struggles supported by global perspectives that can lead towards democratization and a better future for a generation of girls and boys in the North and East.

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