f
all the frightening images that have struck our missionaries in Sierra Leone
during the present crisis, the most troublesome is that of the child-soldiers.
When the missionaries recognized among the rebels many gun-toting pre-teens who were once students in their own schools, the missionaries could only wonder in astonishment at what had happened, and ask the question that seemed to have no answer, “Why?”
“We have lost a whole generation of youth,” they sadly realized. Those young people, very many of whom were conscripted at gunpoint and forced to commit atrocities and destruction on their own kinfolk, after their first horrendous acts had become cold-blooded killers and efficient terrorists. That fact is what fills the missionaries with a frightening sense of helplessness.
“In the 1980’s the standard image to emerge from the world’s disaster zones was a skeletal child with despairing eyes, clutching the hand of an aid worker. This was subsequently displaced by another stereotype, a bearded guerrilla fighter brandishing an AK-47… Today these two images have morphed into the figure of the child soldier, a gun-toting sub teen with wrap-around shades and a threatening demeanor, a child who is clearly not on his way to school,” so writes John Ryle a reporter for the New York Review. (3/4/99)
“The child-at-arms has become the defining image of the troubled lands of the South, of the realm of war and hunger.” He or she has come to represent a whole array of things that have gone wrong with the world: the loss of innocence, the destruction of youth, the collapse or order, the continuing spread of war, the growing burden of injustice. Because we sentimentalize children and despise soldiers, the very term ‘child soldier’ has a disturbing resonance: Formerly we felt sorry and angry about the fate of children in disaster zones. Now we feel sorry and fearful.”
According to a report from Amnesty International, In the Firing Line, there are at least 300,000 children under eighteen engaged in thirty-six armed conflicts around the world, a dozen of them in Africa. Such young people are the focus of a campaign by Amnesty, Doctors Without Borders, and other human rights organizations dedicated to outlawing their participation in armed conflict. The proposal is to expand the 1989 US Convention on the Rights of the Child to include a new protocol banning military recruitment below the age of eighteen (The current minimum age is fifteen).
It
is certainly imperative to reduce and try to put an end to the dreadful abuse of
children in conflicts, both as victims and as perpetrators.
But how does one control these evils when we consider that most of the
inhabitants of the continent of Africa, for example, are under eighteen?
There are many African societies where a seventeen-year-old would not
necessarily be considered a child, and might well be expected to take on the
role of an adult, possibly the head of the household.
For many such young people, the choice is likely to be soldiering or
starvation. “In Africa as in
other troubled regions of the world, when there is no government body to protect
you, a gun maybe the only way to ensure that you and your family have food, and
that someone else doesn’t take it away from you.”
It is true that youths with guns can become monsters, that they may terrorize,
rather than defend, the local people. It
would be a far better thing if they learned the art of peace.
This is the challenge and obligation that cries out loud and clear in the
face of every culture, society, government and institution.
It is the imperative and Christ-given task of religion, and missionaries in particular, especially in the face of shattering instances of insecurity, injustice, and apparent failure, to help the people regain their sense of value as human persons, and of our common Divine origin. “You have only one Father – Jesus said – and He is in Heaven” (Matt. 23:9). We have one parent, one origin, we belong to the same family. We are indeed all brothers and sisters. The weakest and the youngest are the privileged for the Father. They must be for us as well!
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)