Introduction

Widespread global condemnation of the use of children as soldiers and fierce advocacy efforts have culminated in the entry into force on 12 February 2002 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. States parties must now take “all feasible” measures to eliminate all but voluntary recruitment (under specific conditions) of under 18s into armed forces and to raise the legal age for direct participation in hostilities to 18.

The rapidity with which this consensus was achieved is in part due to widespread moral outrage at the notion of sending children into battle. The images were graphic and yanked relentlessly at our heartstrings: children barely tall enough to carry those ubiquitous AK-47s, clothed in scraps of uniforms and shod in gum-boots. Who would want to be seen to object to such an agreement? Estimates of the number of child soldiers involved in combat run in the region of 300,000. We hear of children being abducted, drugged, brainwashed, coerced, tortured and forced to commit acts against their communities that effectively sever their social contract at such a tender age.

Those fortunate enough to survive, be released or escape face a long road home. Their families and communities view them simultaneously with suspicion and sympathy; as both victims and perpetrators. “They are seen increasingly as immoral and disrespectful, and their roles as perpetrators as well as victims in the conflict has invoked confusion and fear in the hearts and minds of their families and communities”, declares a study carried out in Northern Uganda by the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. “A gulf emerges between the generations as local traditions and war-related stresses discourage young people from open discussions with adults, including public officials and teachers, about their situation and changing roles.”

The ambiguity of youth

Ironically, youth is supposed to be a time of changing roles, of trying on independence and testing authority as part of healthy personal development. This is enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the parent agreement of the Optional Protocol.

The generation gulf rings familiar because intergenerational discord, albeit in many forms, is universal. But the difference between youthful rebellion in war-torn Africa and youthful rebellion in the developed world is that the latter permits safe expression: within the family, the community, the school, the university campus. These are the structures in a peaceful society that guide youth and protect them from adult moral and political consequences of less-than-mature actions. This is not to say that African youth in war-ravaged countries are naturally drawn to violence; it suggests that their lives are not circumscribed in safe, socially sanctioned arenas, leaving them vulnerable to involvement in war. This represents nothing less than a fundamental inability on the part of families, communities and states to protect the young. In the case of states, it sometimes represents the profoundly warped and myopic priorities of rotten regimes clinging to power.

In Africa the ambiguity of youth has caused a generation to become pawns in a deceptive game that appears to polarise civilisation against barbarity; one in which youth will consistently emerge in the barbarian corner, coerced or otherwise. Young Africans have every reason to say “we are angry and will use violence to change things”. Predictably, we are only invited to listen to the voices of the youngest victims of the worst atrocities. The voices of youth (for those over 18) issue forth from the wrong side of international law and the grey area of popular appeal. The agency of young people is co-opted to serve agendas that rob them of their own futures.

For failing, kleptocratic states whose economies thrive on armed conflict, youth are the natural source of manpower; a cog in the war machine that allows governments to skim many times more off their state revenue than the international community can scrape together to feed their displaced, exhausted and hungry people. Global Witness reveals that while Angola’s defense expenditures are a burgeoning 40% of the country’s national budget, of which some US$3 billion is oil revenue, humanitarian agencies battle to contain a hunger crisis that has dragged on for years. Young people fortunate enough to attend school (in a country spending a pathetic three per cent of its budget on education) drop out if they cannot pay the bribes, so deep runs the mentality of graft and corruption.

What warring states would like us to believe is that their rivals’ evil agendas involve the mass enslavement of children and youth to send to the front lines. What do we hear from the young men and women who make up fighting forces, apart from the horror stories of the smallest? The media are complicit. Child protection agencies running interim care centres for unaccompanied children in Sierra Leone have had to institute a ‘no journalist’ policy in an attempt to fend off those hunting for younger victims of worse atrocities. The phenomenon of ‘poster children’ scarcely even begins to describe the scale of the problem and borders on the pornographic. Child soldiers represent a generation absorbed into the main economic activity offered by those in power, which just happens to be warfare. The unfathomable political dysfunction that causes suffering of hundreds of thousands of child soldiers and the social and economic exclusion of millions of youth cannot be summed up in photos of ragged children.

Conclusion

In the end, youth in armed conflict occupy a remarkable position. They face the possibility of being crushed militarily while their governments entertain human rights and UN organisations, sign legal instruments and express their dismay at the Poster Children over conference hors d’oeuvres and cocktails.

Violent oppression of minorities in Africa has reached terrifying proportions. In the sinister guise of civilisation holding back barbarism, the young African majority faces a backlash of a scale that destabilises an entire continent.

The Optional Protocol seeks to address a symptom of conflicts rooted in greed and inequality. In a perfect world, all of Africa will sign, ratify and stringently adhere to the optional protocol. There will be everlasting peace for sheer lack of legal cannon-fodder. In this world, African hope lies in the potential of African youth, which is being squandered in the most treacherous manner.