Amnesty says recruitment escalated since Darfur conflict flared
LONDON (AlertNet) - Boys as young as 13 are being recruited by Chad's army despite a government promise to stop using child soldiers, as well as by Chadian and Sudanese rebel groups, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
The recruitment of children from villages and refugee camps in eastern Chad has escalated in the past six years as the conflict in neighbouring Sudan's Darfur region has spilled across the border, the rights watchdog said in a report.
Recruiters exploit family links or appeal to ethnic loyalties to persuade boys and adolescents to join them. In some cases, middlemen in camps sheltering refugees and communities uprooted by the fighting are paid to help with the recruitment.
Recruiters often used child soldiers to entice new recruits with money, clothes and cigarettes.
The report, based on interviews with 41 former child soldiers and a range of officials between April 2009 and October 2010, said other children were abducted and forcibly recruited.
"It is tragic that thousands of children are denied their childhood and are manipulated by adults into fighting their wars," said Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty International’s Africa programme director.
Many children joined the army and rebel groups to escape poverty and a lack of jobs in one of Africa's poorest countries.
A former child soldier told Amnesty he volunteered to join a rebel group when he was 13. "My father is old. At home we did not have enough for everyone, so I wanted to better our situation and join the army to help my family and my mother," he is quoted as saying.
It is not unusual in a culture in which males aged between 13 and 18 are considered adults, for their families to encourage them to join to protect their communities.
"It is a militarised society and the army is very much a token of power and authority so it is very appealing to some. It gives a certain prestige," van der Borght told AlertNet.
HYPOCRISY
The exact number of child soldiers in Chad is unclear.
Amnesty's report cited U.N. figures dating back to 2007 of between 7,000 and 10,000 child soldiers. It estimates about 8 in 10 child soldiers are fighting in rebel ranks while the rest are enlisted in the Chadian military.
Amnesty said around 850 former recruits had received help to rebuild their lives from the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF, by December 2010. This suggests that potentially thousands of child soldiers are still active, although there are reports of former recruits returning to their villages or camps.
A lack of political will, impunity for commanders using child soldiers, mixed signals from the United States and a cultural acceptance of the recruitment of teenage boys compound the problem, Amnesty's van der Borght said.
Amnesty is also worried about the impact of the withdrawal of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Chad at the end of 2010. U.N. human rights monitors, who used to document abuses as part of the mission, have left along with the blue helmets.
In June, Chad hosted a regional conference on how to end the use of children by national armies and rebel groups with officials from Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan.
But six months later, the Chadian government declared an amnesty for crimes committed by rebel groups, a move that ruled out any criminal investigation of rebel leaders over the recruitment of child soldiers, van der Borght said.
"That's the sort of contrast that is very clearly there between certain rhetoric from the Chadian authorities and the reality on the ground," he said. "It's obviously the political will which is not there and a level of hypocrisy which is there from the Chadian authorities."
Washington has also sent the wrong signal, Amnesty says.
It identifies Chad among the countries recruiting child soldiers but in October President Barack Obama signed a memorandum granting waivers to the application of the U.S. Child Soldiers Prevention Act to Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Yemen, the rights group said.
The act prohibits the United States from giving military assistance to governments that use and recruit child soldiers.
The New York Times quoted administration spokesmen as saying the law would have have penalised countries providing crucial cooperation with the United States, including in the fight against Al Qaeda militants. In some cases, they said, it was easier to press countries to stop using young soldiers if Washington remained closely engaged with them.
"One the one hand, the U.S. has taken quite a strong stand on this. They have national laws put in place, they're quite vocal on this in the U.N. Security Council but then at the first opportunity, when it serves their interest, they put that aside," van der Borght said.
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