Beasts of No Nation: Child Soldiers in Africa

This Here on Earth program deals with the topic of child soldiers. Ann Strainchamp’s guests are Uzodinma Iweala, a 24-year-old Harvard graduate who wrote a novel about child soldiers, and Joe Bakker, children’s right advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, an independent organization that conducts investigations concerning human right’s abuses.

In the beginning of the radio show Uzodinma Iweala explains why he decided to write his book. Aged 16 he came home from school one day and read an article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone in Newsweek magazine. He was really disturbed after reading it because he realised that these children were about his age and that all this happened in an area he knew very well since his parents came from there. The young boy cared about the topic too much to just dismiss it, so he did some research, talked to many former child soldiers and the result of all this is a book that got a lot of praise by the media. Writing the book was very important for him because he felt that a novel telling a specific, personal story will open more eyes and touch more people than all the statistics.

Nobody knows how many child soldiers are really out there fighting in armed conflicts all over the world but it is estimated that there are about 300 000, between the ages eight and sixteen. These children are coerced into being soldiers either because they are forced by the people who abduct them or by situations like hunger, lack of education or lack of work. Once they are with the troop they will be fighting with they are made addicted, for two reasons. Firstly when they are addicted to drugs or alcohol they can’t run away any longer because they need the substance they are addicted to and can only get it if they stay with their troop. And secondly they kill more readily when they are under the influence of a specific substance. One very cruel method is treating the children with gun powder, either they force them to eat it or press it into open wounds to make it enter their bloodstream more quickly. With this method, they make their soldiers more aggressive and less fearful.
Unfortunately it is very easy for the commanders to make their future soldiers amenable. Another fact they take advantage of is that children aged eight or nine can easily be influenced. This is the age at which children form their values and if they’re told often enough that killing is right, they will believe it and never think of the consequences of their actions.
Not all of the little soldiers really have to fight, some of them die before they get the “chance” to do so. Very often they are used as shields, human mine detectors or suicide bombers because children attract less attention.

Fortunately some of those kids who got deprived of their innocence and childhood manage to flee or are rescued. But even then, they are confronted with a lot of problems. Many former child soldiers who are rescued don’t get any help because people think that they are lost and that humanity left them. Of course, this is true with some of them, but this is a very small percentage. The mental state they are in depends on how strong they are and on how much evil they have seen and committed. Still, those children need to get help and need to get a lot of support. They have to be given the chance to participate in rehabilitation programs in order to make it possible for them to be reintegrated into society. Many communities in Africa offer reconciliation ceremonies, others expect their returned children to do community service, help the families of their victims etc. Many children feel a lot of guilt and have nightmares, and if they feel like that, it is especially important for them to feel acceptance. Of course they killed people and caused a lot of harm, but they were victims themselves: They didn’t have any choice, either they killed or they were killed.

Most people in the industrialized world seem to feel a subtle indifference to what is happening in Africa. From time to time, we read about child soldiers in the newspapers. But this heartbreaking method of fighting wars only seldom appears on the news because journalists look for the news of the day. The sad truth is that sending children into wars happens every day, and not only in Africa.