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"After four months of training they put me to a test. They put a person before me and ordered me to shoot him. I shot him. After the test they considered me good and they gave me a gun."
—from Child Soldiers in Africa, by Alcinda Honwana
"We were told that when we came out, the government would kill us. They created a lot of fear. Those who tried to escape were battered to death. I saw at least fourteen receive this fate. When I was abducted, I was a very young girl, so they gave me to a man who made me his wife. After that, I was a woman."
—from Innocents Lost, by Jimmie Briggs
The black-and-white cover photo of Jimmie Briggs' book, Innocents Lost, shows a boy starting up on his bicycle. We are in a rural area somewhere: a dirt road fringed with high grass and brush. The boy has the bike pointing away from us; we cannot see his face. His boots are caked with mud, as is his bike, which shows signs of makeshift repairs.
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The bike is too big for the boy. We can see from the angle of his body that getting up on the seat without toppling over will take concentration. And yet, he will do it. He shows by the taut determination in his limbs that he is determined to do it, even if it takes several tries.
This portrait of childhood captures at once its solitude and its ambitions: to ride a bike, to go freely somewhere of my choosing, and to master mechanical tools. Only one detail prevents us from falling into a reverie of youthful past: the boy has an AK-47 slung over his shoulder.
Children have always gone to war. Alcinda Honwana mentions the Children's Crusades of 1212, the armies of Napoleon, and the British navy under Lord Nelson, which had "many naval cadets and midshipmen of fifteen, as well as younger cabin boys and 'powder monkeys.'" Nevertheless, our age uses unprecedented numbers of very young children in wars of unbelievable savagery. Militias are often more like ghetto gangs than traditional armies with their rigid discipline and ethical limits. Honwana quotes Mary Kaldor to the effect that new armies "use techniques of terror, ethnic cleansing or genocide as deliberate war strategies. In the new wars, battles are rare and violence is directed against civilians. Violations of humanitarian and human rights law are not a side effect of war but the central methodology of new wars." According to Michael Wessells, in the first half of the 20th century over 90 percent of war-related deaths were soldiers. Now, 75 percent of casualties are civilians, with women and children the majority.
Such total wars are common in Africa, with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, Mozambique, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Somalia, and Sudan fresh in memory. But there are also examples in Sri Lanka, India, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Colombia. In all these cases, children are deliberately and systematically recruited as soldiers. Sometimes they are abducted, as with the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. In other cases, families or communities are pressured to contribute children to the cause; and in some cases children volunteer. Training is usually rudimentary. Living conditions are often brutal, with hunger and fear a consistent theme, as the children quoted in Honwana's book make clear:
"Our commanders were really mean and nasty. We were very scared of them. One day, while we were still doing our military training, we got permission to go bathe in the river, but we stayed there for quite a while because we started playing, swimming and enjoying ourselves. Time just flew. Our instructor came to look for us. He was so furious that he shot my friend, who died on the spot. I feel so sad when I remember all these things."
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