The lost boys

Abstract

The lost boys W hen Thomas went to war, he was 11. The Kalashnikov he was given to carry -and use -was bigger than he was, but it was not heavy, and he carried it with ease. The first thing he was ordered to do, to prove that he was worthy to be a soldier, was to execute a man captured from the other side. He protested but when told he would die himself if he did not obey the order, he used his gun. In the weeks and months that followed, travelling around Liberia with the rebel faction, the Independent National Patriotic Front, he pushed people into wells and left them to die, he watched women being gang-raped, and he was given 'bubbles' -amphetamines -to make him 'strong and brave' in battle. He was often punished, by having his elbows tied together behind his back, and the rope pulled tighter and tighter until his ribcage seemed to come apart. When the soldiers untied him, his arms stayed paralysed for a long time.Children make excellent soldiers. They are biddable, brave, ask few questions, and can be easily bullied and punished. Some see war as a game. The phenomenon of child soldiers is not new -children have been camp followers since well before the Napoleonic wars, and underage conscripts have long been taken to swell the ranks when armies run short of adult men. What is new, however, is the extent to which they are being used in many of the civil wars across Africa, south-east Asia and Latin America; what is also new is the role assigned to them as shock troops, now that technology has made weapons light, manageable and simple to fire. Children and their childhoods are thus another civilian casualty in the exercise that modern war has become, in which soldiers

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