Human Goods

(Source: Associated Press)

The latest violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to reinvigorate child recruitment efforts, IRIN reported this week.

The intensification of fighting in the North Kivu region, which resumed in August between the Congolese government and the rebel Congres National pour la Defense du Peuple (CNDP), is expected to raise the number of children fighting in the region well beyond the estimated 3,000 already abducted.

Ishbel Matheson, a spokeswoman for Save the Children, told IRIN:

Children who are forced into armed conflict suffer terrible physical and emotional damage.  They are traumatized by being separated from their families and may witness executions, beatings, and torture.  Many young girls now have babies.

Hundreds of schools have been forced to close due to the risk of abduction.  Troops have been known to attack them, raiding even primary school classrooms for fresh combatants and concubines.

(source: fee-ach/flickr)

A deadly weapon can be acquired almost anywhere in the developing world for around $5, the UN News Centre reports

On top of the black market for weapons, there are 600 companies in 95 countries worldwide that legally produce small arms, and this is linked to the practice of forcing children to become soldiers, according to a UN envoy on children and armed conflict.

Since it is so easy for almost anyone to obtain a weapon, and many governments are unable or unwilling to protect their most vulnerable citizens, recruitment of children becomes an easy option.

Burmese child soldier in WWII

(photo by Henry Allen, from the National Archives, 1944)

Myanmar, Seth Mydans wrote in The New York Times this week, has one of the world’s highest recruitments of child soldiers, with many of them coerced through violence, kidnapping, and terror to join the army.

Mydans draws his information from a report recently released by Human Rights Watch on the use of child soldiers worldwide. According to the report, Myanmar is the worst offender, beating out Sudan, Uganda, and the Congo.

Mydans sums up Myanmar’s evaluation in the article:

The report, issued last October, said that military recruiters and civilian brokers scour train stations, bus stations, markets and other public places for boys and coerce them to volunteer.

The recent cyclone has only exacerbated the problem. With homes and families wiped away, some small children get lost and don’t even know the names of the villages they come from.

Relief groups are trying to do something about the swarms of children that wander around crowded and chaotic refugee camps, but they don’t have a program to try to help families reconnect in place yet.

This is a concern, because the chaos has put the cyclone’s most vulnerable survivors at extremely high risk of being trafficked into the military or sexual abuse.