Last week when the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda announced they would be releasing child soldiers from within their ranks, my feelings swayed between ebbs of empathy, considering the hapless horrors of war they had endured, and tides of unqualified relief that they’d finally re-unite with the safety and succour of family and community. UN Undersecretary Egeland remarked on this, warmly approving the disbanding of these war juveniles and affirming UN support to enable them rejoin their peers and parents in the villages. That presumably would entail ID verification, the exceptional treat to a hot shower, fresh duds, and then some form of transport – a jalopy-jeep or two – towing them through potholed tracks that snake across the countryside, back to the rural backwaters overrun by drought and disease. Home Sweet Home. What then?
For all the pietistic bluster the UN jabbers on concerning these little ones – protecting the rights of the child soldier, punishing the injustices meted out on the child soldier – precious little is actually done in this regard. There are no resettlement projects to speak of, no prospects of psychological remediation for the traumas they suffered. For many, there are no peers or parents to return to, no joyful whoops of welcome, no home-coming parade, just eerie emptiness. Of all war returnees, child soldiers find it hardest to rehabilitate, because unlike others, their hands have been stained crimson, oftentimes with the blood of relatives, neighbours, siblings, blood they were coerced to spill in the twisted cruelty of conscription exercises. Demonized by society, they are subjected to shifting shoulders and stony stares, fated to eke out a shambles of an existence in dereliction and depthless despair. Even their nights are denied the solace of sleep, haunted by the guilt-ridden memories of war and gore, their minds raw with the sores of sustained abuse and indoctrination, each passing day pushing them progressively towards the fringes of insanity and suicide.
Sadly, their deplorable predicament is endured against the backdrop of a disturbing media silence. While accounts of the “Veterans of Vietnam” are still whipped out periodically whenever news networks wax nostalgic, the story of the child soldier seems to have been unceremoniously shoved under the carpet, with little attention given to their plight post-conflict. What’s worse, some find they may have to suffer the vindictive consequences of their unwitting actions during the war because of a loophole in the international charters supposed to protect them! Because the UN Convention’s Protocol on children in armed conflict confines culpability to soldiers of age 18 and over but is unaccountably vague on the definition of ‘child soldier’, children who turn adult within armed ranks are automatically liable to prosecution (makes one wonder why the terrorist planes missed the UN Headquarters in New York).
The world may not realise it, but ignoring the child soldiers of our time is like smothering a ticking time-bomb by sitting on it. Let’s only hope that by the time it explodes, the whole world then will be “…all ears”?
