History of children in the military
[2][8][9][10] Some children are recruited by force while others choose to join up, often to escape poverty or because they expect military life to offer a rite of passage to maturity.
[citation needed] In a practice dating back to antiquity, children were routinely taken on a campaign, together with the rest of a military man's family, as part of the baggage.
[11] In medieval Europe young boys from about twelve years of age were used as military aides ("squires"), though in theory, their role in actual combat was limited.
[16] By a law signed by Nicholas I of Russia in 1827 a disproportionate number of Jewish boys, known as the cantonists, were forced into military training establishments to serve in the army.
[citation needed] In the final stages of the Paraguayan War, children fought in the Battle of Acosta Ñu against the Allied forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
[citation needed] The youngest known soldier of World War I was Momčilo Gavrić, who joined the 6th Artillery Division of the Serbian Army at the age of 8, after Austro-Hungarian troops in August 1914 killed his parents, grandmother, and seven of his siblings.
[citation needed] Many child soldiers fought in the Spanish Civil War: The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens.
Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, typically refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them.
The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the trench and fall fast asleep.
[25] After the Arusha peace accord of 2001 and the Pretoria agreement of 2003 eventually brought the conflict to an end in 2005,[26] the new constitution committed to not using children in direct combat.
[23] The parties to the conflict no longer recruited children in large numbers, but many remained active in the FNL, which had denounced the peace accord.
[28] They were also integrated into various rebel forces, including the United Front for Democratic Change (Front Uni pour le Changement, FUC), local self-defense forces known as Tora Boro militias, and two Sudanese rebel movements operating in Chad: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the G-19 faction of the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA).
[22] Thousands of children saw membership of an armed group on either side of the war as a way to earn a living,[31] although they were often unpaid, having to acquire money through extortion or begging.
[21] There were many reports of child recruitment and use (including conscription from age 15),[22] but there is little information today about the extent of the practice, which is due in part to the absence of effective birth registration and age-verification system at the time.
[21][22] It was the common practice of commanders to give children drugs and threaten them with execution in order to enhance their obedience; for example, soldiers were frequently given valium before a battle, known as "bubbles" or "10-10".
[24] Initial demobilisation and reintegration programmes failed after many schools banned former child soldiers[21] and a high rate of unemployment rendered them vulnerable to re-recruitment by militia groups.
[21] After 2002, when the war was declared over, an extensive United Nations disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programme reunited most former child soldiers with their communities, although it drew criticism for neglecting the needs of women and girls.
[46] In Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism anthropologist David M. Rosen discusses the murders, rapes, tortures, and thousands of amputations committed by the RUF Small Boys Unit.
[49] Over a period of twenty years the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 30,000 boys and girls as soldiers or sex slaves.
This attempt by the LRA to gain control of the Ugandan government via roaming armies used boy- as well as girl-children as soldiers,[51] such as Grace Akallo.
The warrant for Kony, Otti and Odhiambo includes the alleged crime of the forced enlisting of children contrary to the Rome Statute Art.
[62][63] During the civil war between 1980 and 1992 the Salvadoran military and the main opposition group, the Frente Farabundo Martí de Liberación National (FMLN), recruited children extensively.
[21]The children involved were overwhelmingly from slums and poor villages,[21] and some participated without the knowledge of their parents, including Mohammad Hossein Fahmideh.
The government of Saddam Hussein maintained 'boot camps' of civilian youths between the ages of 12 and 17 that involved small arms training and Ba'athist political indoctrination.
The state incorporated male children as young as ten into the Futuwah and Ashbal Saddam youth movements and then subjected them to military training, sometimes for 14 hours a day.
[80] In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US forces fought children at Nasariya, Karbala, and Kirkuk, and the US sent captured child combatants to Abu Ghraib prison.
[83] In the 1970s the Khmer Rouge exploited thousands of desensitised, conscripted children in their early teens to commit mass murder and other atrocities during the Cambodian civil war and subsequent genocide.
[85] Many children had fled the Khmer Rouge without a means to feed themselves and hoped that joining the government forces would enable them to survive, although local commanders frequently denied them any pay.
[21][22] In 2001, international sources estimated that 40 percent of Tamil Tiger personnel were children, contrary to official statements insisting that the organisation did not use them.
According to the UN: "Child soldiers in Chechnya were reportedly assigned the same tasks as adult combatants, and served on the front lines soon after joining the armed forces.
