Former child soldiers enlisted by Al Shabaab are handed over to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) after their capture by forces of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Credit: UN Photo/Tobin Jones

By Jonathan Rozen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 10 2014 (IPS)

In 2003, Moses Otiti, a 15-year-old from Uganda, was walking in a group with his father when members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) ambushed them.

Because he was a child, Moses was the only one to survive. For the next 12 months, he was forced to serve the LRA as a soldier in the rebel group’s war against the Ugandan government.“In the first month when I joined [the LRA], I was not comfortable with the things that were going on, but then I reached a situation where everything became almost normal." -- Moses Otiti

“The reason why they didn’t kill me was because they were really [looking for] people who were young…they really wanted to groom them as soldiers who can fight the battle against the government,” Otiti told IPS.

Conflicts in the modern age are being fought less frequently between states, and more often within them. And with this shift, the use of children in combat has emerged as a striking trend.

Researchers and those who work on the issue of child soldiers say that in conflicts where the phenomenon is present, there is a greater likelihood that mass atrocities will be committed.

“Children don’t have the same capacity to make decisions or to understand what may be right or wrong, or they might not have the same level of life experience or education to determine some of the things that an adult can,” Shelly Whitman, director of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, told IPS.

“It is a time when they are very impressionable and they are still figuring out their identity and moral compass.

“Problems of economics, development and social dynamics [are important] to look at as well,” she added. “When we get down to that level, it shows you that there are a whole wider set of problems, it is possible that when that is allowed to happen the [societal] degradation can go further.”

The role of violence

Moses describes the centrality of violence to the recruitment process, explaining how the LRA soldiers threatened to kill him, just like his father, unless he joined their army.

“For them to recruit you, they would cane you until you are at the point where you are about to die, and if you survive that means you can be a soldier. But if you die, that means you would not make a very good soldier…and that would be the end of you,” Otiti told IPS.

A map of where in the world most child soldiers are located. Source: A Window to the World

Commanders like children because it is easier to manipulate their psychological capacity to participate in mass atrocities. For example, Cambodian child soldiers under the Khmer Rouge were, as a result of this malleability, more ruthless towards civilians than adult soldiers, state Jo Boyden and Sara Gibbs in their book “Children of War”.

“Children are particularly affected by excessive violence because it occurs at a crucial stage of a human being’s development,” Marie Lamensch, assistant to the director at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS), told IPS.

“The environment in which a child grows up affects his cognitive and affective development. Child soldiers, whether they kill or not, are exposed to physical and verbal violence, they are subject to fear and helplessness,” she said. “That trauma will affect the way they react to their environment, now and in the future.”

This is not to say that children do not have morals.

“[Children forced into military service] have their moral compass in the first few weeks of being abducted, and they know what they are doing is wrong, but the more they kill people, the more they rape or do other things like that, their brain and moral compass switches off,” Moses Makasa, director of development for Watoto, a Ugandan organisation which helps to rehabilitate former child soldiers like Otiti, told IPS.

Otiti’s experience echoes this process. “In the first month when I joined them, I was not comfortable with the things that were going on, but then I reached a situation where everything became almost normal,” he said.

“When I joined them (the LRA), I really felt that what they were doing wasn’t right, but then that thought kept on fading away from my mind…[But] I never liked it.”

Moses explained how this fading distinction between right and wrong made life with the LRA easier to manage.

Past, present and future

Several current conflicts display the correlation between child soldiers and the potential for mass atrocities.

South Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR) are “two situations where grave violations of human rights are taking place and where there is a great danger of mass atrocities,” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a meeting of the General Assembly on Jan. 17.

On Feb. 4, the UN also published a special report on children in Syria’s civil war, which indicated the use of children in combat.

In 2002 the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict and the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, entered into force.

These outlawed the involvement of children under age 18 in hostilities and made the conscription, enlistment or use of children under age 15 in hostilities a war crime. In 2004, the U.N. Security Council also unanimously condemned the use of child soldiers.

Child soldiers are “the most easily identifiable warning tool” for mass atrocities, said Roméo Dallaire, U.N. commanding officer in the 1994 Rwandan peacekeeping mission, Canadian senator and founder of the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, connecting the recruitment of child soldiers as both a precursor and “primary weapon” of the genocide in Rwanda and any potential future genocide.

Since Moses Otiti escaped from the LRA during a firefight with government forces, he has worked to rebuild his life, and is now studying hard to become a doctor.

“When I was still there, there were certain things they would do, like killing people, and that is how I used to understand things. But when I came home…my understanding of taking peoples lives for granted really changed,” he told IPS. “Every person is very important.”

“These children who are suffering so much today are the ones who will either repair those societies or repeat the violence of these societies in the next generation,” Anthony Lake, head of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, said in February.

If the world does not seriously address the education and rehabilitation of these children, “we are going to lose generations,” he warned.

Against the backdrop of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a panel of United States government officials and experts called for stronger methods to prevent modern-day genocides and mass atrocities, particularly in the case of Syria.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the highest-ranking government official at the panel Tuesday, held in cooperation with the Council on Foreign Relations and CNN, addressed the mass killings of Syrian citizens by President Bashar al-Assad. She defended the administration’s decision not to directly intervene in Syria by force, but said that nevertheless, the administration is taking steps to address the situation there.

“We are increasing our efforts to assist the opposition,” she said about the Syrian rebels. “We know that the sooner it ends, the less violence there will be, and the less chance there is for extremism to take hold.”

In a poll of 1,000 U.S. citizens released Tuesday, conducted by the polling firm Penn Schoen Berland in conjunction with the panel, 78 percent of those surveyed support the U.S. taking military action to stop genocide or mass atrocities.

“Americans believe they have a moral responsibility to prevent or stop genocide around the world, even if it means putting boots on the ground,” Mark Penn, CEO of Burson-Marsteller, one of the firms that commissioned the poll, said. “But they view multilateral action as the most effective military strategy for prevention.”

The poll also suggested, however, that U.S. citizens are not satisfied with the U.N.’s handling of current genocides or mass atrocities. In the poll, 55 percent said that the international community was not effective at protecting civilians from genocide or mass atrocities.

The U.N. has so far not taken action in Syria, as two veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council, Russia and China, have blocked action. Other countries, including all the remaining permanent members of the council — the U.S., Britain and France — have called for intervention in Syria.

While public perception might seem hawkish, Clinton was adamant that less extreme measures needed to be taken. “Force must remain a last resort,” Clinton said. “In most cases, other tools will be more appropriate: through diplomacy, financial sanctions, humanitarian assistance (or) law enforcement measures.”

The Obama administration has made preventing genocide a foreign policy priority.

In April, Obama announced to formation of the Atrocity Prevention Board, a governmental department focused on genocides around the world, and has asked that the U.S. intelligence community account for the risk of mass atrocities and genocide in national intelligence estimates.

21st century genocide

While other experts agree that preventive measures are key, there is disagreement about what causes genocides and what policies get at the root of the problem most effectively, particularly with such a new and complex paradigm.

Looking at the possible causes of future genocides, Chris Kojm, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said that the “nexus of food, water and resources” would be a prevailing problem in the future.

Kojm said that nearly half the world’s population will be living in areas of severe water stress by 2030. “That’s an enormous factor to stability,” he said, adding that the incessant competition for resources will increase the likelihood of mass killings.

“Unpredictability leads to the mass killings,” said Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale University.

He says that this unpredictability, brought on by global warming and other factors, will spur governmental panic over the scarcity of remaining resources.

However, Kojm issued a caveat. “We must remain open to the possibility that the past is not necessarily a predictor of where and when mass atrocities will occur, or the means by which they will,” he said.

Technology has played an increasing role in 21st century genocides, and the Obama administration has taken note. In April, Obama signed an executive order imposing financial and travel restrictions on companies that provided technological aid the Syrian and Iranian governments used to hunt down their citizens.

The groups targeted by the restrictions included Syriatel, a Syrian communications company, and Datak Telecom, an Iranian Internet service provider.

“Access to technology, as opposed to access to information, is becoming the human right,” Strieve Masiyiwa, founder of Econet Wireless, a large technology firm based in Zimbabwe, which has been the site of genocides under President Robert Mugabe.

“The big difference with the technology is that the people, the victims, are empowered to speak, not just people in power,” he added

This has lead to a society where the victims get a voice, but are increasingly dependent upon social media, according to some in the media.

“Without social media, there would be a black hole,” said Arwa Damon, a Beirut correspondent for CNN who has been covering the Syrian conflict. “If social media did not exist, you could be assured that the killings would surpass what it is now.”

But the effect of social media extends further that that, according to other foreign policy experts.

“Social media connects people to transparency,” said Sarah Sewall, founder of the Mass Atrocity Response Operations Project and a national security adviser to Obama.

“The question is: What do you do with the awareness to galvanise change?”