From today WP – the important part of the article below is NOT the specific fact situation. It is the attitudes behind them. Killing children who are armed is somehow awful. Troops are supposed to respond to aggression and then only with minimal force. This is not warfare. This is armed social work. This is also what Europe, the NGO’s and the cosmopolite internationalist wing of the US media and political spectrum expect.
Forget that these attitudes are insane. They are a part of the modern environment. They are what every US mission must contend with. War as an old fashioned instrument of national policy is obsolete and obscene to these folks.
This is not a difference of opinion that can be settled at the margins. It is a more restrictive concept that most US urban police forces operate under. If we accept such rules and concepts, then there are very few situations where military force can be effective
Actions, consequences. Memes count.
Scott
BUNIA, Congo -- With his baggy jeans and oversized military fatigues, Eric Mabele patrolled this town with a rifle at his side and a few grenades looped around his belt.
Enemy forces are scattered all around Bunia, eager to fight their way in. Fierce-looking French troops have been storming into town this week to take up peacekeeping duties. But Eric, slouching and taking a sip of beer, said he wasn't scared. At 12 years old, he is an experienced soldier.
"I am not afraid," said Eric, who has curly black hair and long eyelashes and said he had shot three people during the fighting between his Hema ethnic group and their rivals, the Lendus.
Lounging with some of his less seasoned comrades -- 7- and 8-year-olds who also carried guns -- Eric explained that he had to be ready to kill any Lendu or foreign soldier who challenged him. "I am a soldier," he said. "If today I kill someone, I am okay."
A large number of forces are arrayed around this embattled town in northeastern Congo, and a stunning proportion of them are 12-year-olds toting AK-47s. Child soldiers, or kadogos -- "small ones" in Swahili -- are hardly a new phenomenon in Africa's civil wars. Nearly 300,000 child soldiers are fighting in 30 nations, about 75 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations.
But they are more prevalent in Bunia than anywhere else in the world, U.N. officials say. Sixty percent of the Hema militia forces are children.
And as if the specter of child soldiers doing battle with one another weren't chilling enough, their prevalence here has been haunting the foreign troops who have come to Congo to stop the killing but find themselves wondering what they will do if they find themselves facing armed foes as young as 7.
"Do you shoot a child that looks like he could be your son, even if it looks like they are going to shoot you?" asked Maj. Rob Stein, a Canadian peacekeeper who was dispatched here this week. "In all my years and postings, I have never seen child combatants that look so young and small. You see things here you don't see anywhere else in the world."
"Every time I look at them, I think of my son," said Maj. Alandian Sosa, an Uruguayan peacekeeper who has been here since early May. "They are so small. Sometimes, when I am here, I put myself in God's hand."
After a day patrolling the city, Col. Gerard Dubois, a spokesman for the multinational peace force, acknowledged that the issue is a problem and said that minimal force will be used.
"Of course, if you are in Europe or the U.S.A., you don't speak about child soldiers," Dubois said. "So each case, each event is different. Our soldiers are trained to keep calm when faced with problems. The minimum level of violence is our main goal."
During operations in Sierra Leone and other African conflicts that included child soldiers, peacekeepers have tried a variety of techniques to subdue them without killing them, including shooting them in the leg, punching them or simply trying to persuade them to put down their weapons by talking to them like a parent, military officials said.
But if a soldier is facing the barrel of a gun, it does not matter who is behind it, Dubois said. "If the answer we get is aggression, then we are a force and we have to respond with force," Dubois said.
In response to the crisis, foreign aid workers are scrambling to get the armed children off the streets of Bunia. They have started hanging posters around town that show a cartoon of a grumpy-looking child soldier dressed in military fatigues and holding a gun. There is a giant X over his figure.
"I wouldn't like to be the poor soldier faced with an 8-year-old with a gun," said Johannes Wedenig, head of the eastern Congo office of UNICEF. "It's horrible, but it shows to what level of craziness and inhumanity this has come to."
Aid groups have also pressed factional leaders to take the children out of their armies. International law makes it war crime for military forces to employ soldiers younger than 15.
In an interview this week at one of his three homes, Thomas Lubanga, leader of the Hema group that controls the town, the Union of Congolese Patriots, said he would expel the children from his army. But a day later, young boys were slinging their guns all over town.
At Col. Prince Mugabe's home in Bunia young boys put their guns down to serve juice and beer to one of the leaders of the forces. Mugabe said they are orphans and that the militia pays their school fees. As he sat down with a row of young boys on a puffy maroon sofa, the boys nodded their heads in agreement.
This corner of Congo has no formal school system. The central government in Kinshasa stopped funding schools years ago. The child soldiers often say they used to go to makeshift local schools but stopped because of constant fighting in the area or because their parents couldn't pay school fees.
So they wander the streets with guns that are often as big as they are. The youngest almost disappear into camouflage jackets and pants that must be knotted because they are ridiculously oversized. Their eyes are red from drinking locally made beer.
In some cases, the young soldiers' parents voice no objections. In fact, they send their children out to fight in the name of their ethnic groups.
"My mom is fine with it," Eric said. "In fact, she likes it because I get respect."
His mother, who asked that her name not be published, acknowledged that she had urged him to join.
"What else do we have?" said the woman, who shook her head and threw up her arms. "At least people won't shoot us if he has a gun."
Observers say some of the children take pride in defending their groups, in taking orders and feeling important.
Eric said he was asked to be a soldier last year. He was in school, but war kept hindering classes. "What was the point?" he asked. "We were suffering too much. The Lendus killed my uncle, my stepfather, my stepmother. So I shot three of their people."
The first time he shot someone in the leg, he said, he felt nervous, sad and confused. "I never even cut anyone with a knife," he said. "But now I don't feel anything."
He said that holding a gun is the best thing for him.
"I feel I am respected," Eric said, as he sat on a mattress in a dark room, taking a break from guarding a local street.
But what if he gets into a tangle with an elite unit of foreign troops authorized to shoot to kill ?
"I will be okay," he said. "I have the job of a man."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
posted by scott 12:52 PM