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Trying to end child soldiering without ending war may only
slightly reduce but will not end child soldiering. Child
soldiering is both a symptom of war as well as critical to how
contemporary wars are conducted.
This is because today’s wars are different.
Today’s wars are driven by combinations of external factors
and internal dynamics, including for resources, land and
territory, and by Cold War and super power mentality,
geopolitical and economic power struggles, globalization, War
Against Terrorism, War Against Drugs, unregulated corporate
greed, regional, religious, political and ethno-political
power struggles, and by alliances externally supported
avenging previous injustices. Many of these wars are fueled by
institutional racism, unresolved grievances, and searing
poverty. The chief targets, as a matter of strategy, are
civilian populations. 80-90% of casualties in today’s wars are
civilians, mostly women and children.
Largely because civilians are the target of today’s
wars, children are a soldier of choice. Civilians are
targeted in ways which defy the imagination as today’s wars
use terror and torture, rape and murder, maiming and
mutilation, and destruction of homes, villages, towns,
schools, and clinics as a means of instilling terror, damaging
culture, and destroying infrastructure. Children can, more
easily than adults, be intimidated, traumatized and forced to
commit acts of atrocities against family members and civilian
populations. Children are small, weak, vulnerable,
impressionable and far less mature or able to stand up to
being abducted by military forces.
Children also do not have to be paid – no small benefit to
combatant force commanders who increasingly rely on criminal
activity, collusion with corporate interests and the
attainment of local power through corruption rather than on
monthly checks to survive. Children also provide other
benefits adult soldiers do not – as sex slaves, servants and
body guards.
Children are not simply an undesirable feature of today’s
wars; the abduction and forcible recruitment of children in
today’s wars is part of the modus operandi, the means, of
conducting today’s wars.
A culture of impunity, moreover, and a world order in which
international law is enforced selectively provide a green
light for many who use child soldiers to do so without fear of
consequences. Industrialized and former colonial powers,
multinational corporations, especially mineral companies,
private military contractors, mercenary groups, rebel forces,
proxy armies, warlords, paramilitary organizations, and
organized criminal enterprises rely on children trained to
kill and maim as a key weapon to advance their goals for power
and wealth. International treaties and laws, many ratified by
offending parties, have so far failed to end child soldiering.
UMECS believes strongly that the role of international law is
an important component in ending child soldiering, but that
reliance on the role of international law alone will neither
substantially reduce nor end child soldiering. Addressing the
causes of war, preventing and ending conflict, and addressing
the immediate and long-term needs of millions of former child
soldiers, abductees and children affected by conflict are all
critical to ending child soldiering, especially because former
child soldiers and children affected by conflict are those who
are targeted to be recruited, re-abducted or recycled as child
soldiers, sometimes by an opposing combatant group.
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