TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/06180011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.1 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 30

COVER STORIES

Child Warriors: 

     -- Afghanistan

     -- Northern Ireland

     -- Burma

     -- Los Angeles


By Alessandra Stanley


    Children are born, poets say, trailing clouds of glory.
Theirs is a sheltered and blameless time, a sweet parenthesis
between birth and responsibility. The young are expected to
play, to learn, to feel life in every limb. They are not
supposed to die. And they certainly are not supposed to kill.

    Yet it happens every day in battle zones around the world.
Children as young as eight fight enemies they do not know for
causes they barely understand. War does not rob a child of
youth so much as it reveals his innocence: ignorance of death
and a nervy imperviousness to danger, revealed in a boy's grin
when a mortar shell falls close or in his eagerness to fire
when instinct should tell him to duck.

    Infantry evolved from the French word for child, reflecting
the childlike state of compliance an officer instills in his
troops. Soldiers are taught to obey unquestioningly. Children,
less accustomed to independence than adults, are more
tractable. And though a 13-year-old may not possess the
strength of a soldier ten years his senior, this is the age of
the AK-47 and the M-16, lightweight weapons a youngster can be
taught to use as easily as an adult. Historian John Keegan calls
the M-16 "the transistor radio of modern warfare" and argues
that it has changed the nature of conflict by making fighting
fit for the weak. Children may not make perfect soldiers, but
they make perfectly good ones.

    In 1982 Roger Rosenblatt explored the attitudes of
youngsters growing up in the shadow of combat. His TIME cover
story "Children of War" portrayed the resilience of war's most
innocent victims. By looking at children who actually do the
fighting, TIME now examines the innocent perpetrators, child
warriors, whose efforts often make little difference to the
outcome of a battle but whose participation crystallizes all
that is terrible about war.

    The United Nations has estimated that 200,000 children under
the age of 15 are bearing arms around the world. The Salvadoran
army has forcibly conscripted boys not yet 18, while soldiers
as young as 13 have sworn allegiance to Ethiopian leader
Mengistu Haile Mariam. But most child warriors belong to rebel
groups, where how much they fight depends on how desperately
their services are needed. The mujahedin of Afghanistan have
boys as young as nine battling Kabul. In Burma twelve-year-olds
are recruited by the Karen rebels to defend their jungle
territory. In El Salvador the F.M.L.N. is an equal-opportunity
guerrilla group, one of the few to allow young girls to bear
arms alongside the boys.

    Our memories of war are haunted most by the images of
children fighting. Impassive Khmer Rouge kids, taught to
massacre civilians, even their parents. Idi Amin's army of
thugs, murderous preteens in wraparound sunglasses. Iranian
ten-year-olds sent unarmed into battle as human minesweepers,
with pictures of Khomeini pinned to their shirts. Now
Mozambique is at the vanguard of the unconscionable. The Renamo
rebels fighting the Chissano regime have become infamous for
their instrumentalizados, children kidnaped by Renamo troops
and not just trained to fight but also forced to slaughter and
maim civilians.

    Children are not always coerced. Sometimes they volunteer,
or at least the generals insist that such is the case. In areas
where most of today's fighting is waged -- Africa, Southeast
Asia, the Middle East -- demography is destiny. Manpower is
scarce, and nearly half the population is under 15. With the
right encouragement, children can be ready, even eager, to take
up arms.

    Nonetheless, The Lord of the Flies was wrong. Yes, boys have
a primitive urge to fight, an easily tapped aggression. But
killing is not instinctive; it is an acquired taste, something
that grownups must pass on. Children also have a deep-rooted
desire to please their elders. War satisfies both needs: to a
child, a war is a fight with adult supervision. Because they
so crave love from adults, children can be taught very quickly
to hate. After that, killing is easier.

    History suggests that there is nothing new about child
warriors, partly because in centuries past youngsters were
looked upon as small adults, and thus the sight of them in
combat was less horrifying. But there is a difference between
being trained to fight and being used to make a symbolic point.
In the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, the thousands
of boys and girls who were dispatched from Europe to the Holy
Land went off unarmed and undefended; their very youth was
meant to awe the enemy. Most died of disease or starvation
along the way; many of those who survived were captured by
pirates and enslaved.

    Battle carries its own excitements, and children are as
susceptible to those fevers as adults. Arn Chorn was ten when
he was sent to Wat Aik, a Buddhist temple in Cambodia converted
into a concentration camp by the Khmer Rouge. He spent two
years there, a witness to daily butcheries, and he endured them
in a state of numbness. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978,
he was sent to fight with the Khmer Rouge army. It was a new
kind of terror, but he quickly got used to life on patrol in
swampy jungles. Frightened the first time he fired a carbine,
he grew adept at it and quickly graduated to an AK-47.

    Taken in by an American family in 1980, Arn Chorn is now 22
and a college student in Rhode Island. He understands in
retrospect that he was brainwashed into becoming a Khmer Rouge.
Yet he also remembers how thrillingly fright and excitement
mixed. He can still describe the sweaty terror before an
attack, squatting in the reeds, trembling. Then the fear
metabolized into adrenaline, enhanced by the delight of pumping
an automatic rifle. "Sometimes," he says, "you enjoy yourself
in battle."

    In Afghanistan all boys are urged to fight, even by their
parents. Death on the battlefield is not just an honor, it is
also the Muslim's guarantee of eternal life. In Burma, where
Karen rebels have been fighting for independence for 41 years,
combat has become the family business. Northern Ireland is not
officially at war, but a state of siege between two religions
has made violence the expected. As Alexander Lyons, a Belfast
psychologist, dryly says, "It's the children who don't throw
stones that are abnormal."

    And then there is Los Angeles. Gang violence doesn't fit the
Geneva Convention standard of war: there has been no invasion,
no mass uprising against an oppressor, no minefields, aerial
bombings or refugee camps. Instead, there are small armies of
youths fighting one another and the police. Gang violence is
combat stripped of all the familiar rationales. It is the
closest thing the U.S. has to battle within its borders, and
many of the children emerge from the streets of Los Angeles
more psychologically scarred than the young mujahedin who
patrol the mountain passes of Afghanistan.

    In all these places, the shock of seeing children fighting
fades. It's like entering a darkened room: rather quickly the
eyes adjust to a dimmer light. The mind grows accustomed to the
sight of a little boy among the men, wearing the same uniform,
carrying the same weapon, walking with the same tired swagger.
It is from a distance that the reality of child soldiers
appalls. Even people living close to the fighting find it
easier to forget. Hamed Karzai, the urbane spokesman of the
Afghan rebel government, spends most of his time mediating
between rival mujahedin factions. Sipping tea in the Pakistan
city of Peshawar, 40 miles from the Afghan border, he seems
faintly amused at the notion of young boys fighting on the side
of the rebels. He allows that there might be some children who
take part in battle. "It is a game to them," he says with an
indulgent smile. "They want to play at being soldiers." Karzai
might be surprised at how well they play the game.