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Sadly, children serve as soldiers throughout the world - in Latin America, Asia Europe and Africa – but nowhere is their condition as grim and urgent as in Africa. The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, founded by Amnesty International, Defence for Children International, Human Rights Watch, International Federation Terre des Hommes, International Save the Children Alliance, Jesuit Refugee Service, the Quaker United Nations Office-Geneva and World Vision International believes there are more than 300,000 children serving as soldiers worldwide at any given time, of whom 120,000 are in Africa.

It is generally agreed throughout the world, including by the United Nations, that this number is a soft figure, a low estimate of a more accurate figure that is hard to pin down. This is because most combatant forces – government, rebel or otherwise - do not admit to abducting children and soldiers, or recruiting children below the age of fifteen. Those that do so state they have demobilized children, but fail to admit they are re-recruited. Some children escape or are demobilized by one combatant group and then abducted or recruited by another. Throughout the world, whether in Colombia, Myanmar/Burma, Liberia, Bhutan, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Guatemala, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Sudan or Uganda, child soldiering is not just a violation of the human rights of children. It is a human disgrace.

Nowhere is this human disgrace more prevalent than in Africa. Almost half the world’s child soldiers are in Africa, serving in wars that start and stop and start all over again. The war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a tragic example, a war in which four million people have died since 1998. The magnitude of that statement should be hard to grasp. Four million people have died in the DRC war since 1998, more people than any war since World War II. Yet this war, under official cease-fire but reigniting again, receives precious little publicity internationally and throughout the continent.

Is it because the value of human life in Africa is undervalued? Is there an assumption that the depth of suffering the Congolese people have endured for centuries is somehow expected and acceptable or, if not acceptable, should not be comprehensively addressed by a united African society? Or is the level of hopelessness and disempowerment so high that there are no unified strategies to end the complex span of wars and suffering that has plagued the Great Lakes region in general and DRC in particular?

Whatever one’s thinking on these questions, it is hard to dismiss the fact that few people on Earth have endured as much suffering and external destabilization as the Congolese. From the centuries of slave trading when many millions of the Congo Kingdom’s men, women and children were kidnapped from highly advanced and well governed civilizations to the 19th and 20th century’s pathological colonial reign of King Leopold of Belgium – when perhaps ten million people died from labor camp conditions on rubber plantations in which the strongest of the strong were worked to death and less productive workers had their hands chopped off – the people of the Congo have known little peace.

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