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Child Warriors

© lawhawk

Over the last few days, the press has picked up on the dire situation in Liberia and how there are numerous children actively participating in the warfare, carrying guns and killing people. The problems aren't limited to Liberia. Congo appears to have more than 35,000 child soldiers, only a small portion of whom have been to rehabilitation camps in order to help them lead normal lives; as kids. Many were conscripted by the various militia groups and governments as older men had been killed off by years of conflict.

There is justifiable outrage over those images, but little is being done on the front of children soldiers. The UN has done very little to ban child soldiers. There is a ban in effect, but as you can see by the photos below, there is a long way to go, particularly in the Middle East.

According to Amnesty International (http://www.amnesty.org.au/airesources/pr... ):

[c]urrently there are at least 300,000 children actively engaged in armed conflict in more than 40 countries around the world, including Afghanistan and Uganda.

The treaty, the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, prohibits both the participation of children under the age of 18 in hostilities, and their forced recruitment. It also calls on states to raise the minimum age for voluntary recruitment above 15 years.

And it isn't just in Africa that this problem is bad. It is at its worst in the Middle East, particularly in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority, who has turned childhood into a boot camp for kids who learn nothing but hatred towards Israelis. This kind of incitement is strictly prohibited under both the Oslo Accords and the Road Map, yet these programs persist.

The first image depicts a child soldier in Congo. The second, a child in Monrovia, Liberia. The third, an infant actually, is posing in military fatigues between two machine guns in the Palestinian controlled Gaza City at a funeral for his father who died in the Intifada. The fourth is a Palestinian child posing with a handgun.

The culture of violence starts practically out of the crib in the Palestinian territories. They are weaned on depictions of martyrdom and grandeur by taking the lives of others - specifically Israelis, or more to the point, Jews. There is no question that these children learn this violence from their parents and elders. They are exposed to it constantly and incessantly. Violence is part and parcel of their culture. Their very existence is based on violence.

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