Child Warriors

By Alessandra Stanley

Children are born, poets say, trailing clouds of glory. Theirs is a sheltered and blameless time, a sweet parenthesis between birth and responsibility. The young are expected to play, to learn, to feel life in every limb. They are not supposed to die. And they certainly are not supposed to kill.

Yet it happens every day in battle zones around the world. Children as young as eight fight enemies they do not know for causes they barely understand. War does not rob a child of youth so much as it reveals his innocence: ignorance of death and a nervy imperviousness to danger, revealed in a boy's grin when a mortar shell falls close or in his eagerness to fire when instinct should tell him to duck.

Infantry evolved from the French word for child, reflecting the childlike state of compliance an officer instills in his troops. Soldiers are taught to obey unquestioningly. Children, less accustomed to independence than adults, are more tractable. And though a 13-year-old may not possess the strength of a soldier ten years his senior, this is the age of the AK-47 and the M-16, lightweight weapons a youngster can be taught to use as easily as an adult. Historian John Keegan calls the M-16 "the transistor radio of modern warfare" and argues that it has changed the nature of conflict by making fighting fit for the weak. Children may not make perfect soldiers, but they make perfectly good ones.

In 1982 Roger Rosenblatt explored the attitudes of youngsters growing up in the shadow of combat. His TIME cover story "Children of War" portrayed the resilience of war's most innocent victims. By looking at children who actually do the fighting, TIME now examines the innocent perpetrators, child warriors, whose efforts often make little difference to the outcome of a battle but whose participation crystallizes all that is terrible about war.

The United Nations has estimated that 200,000 children under the age of 15 are bearing arms around the world. The Salvadoran army has forcibly conscripted boys not yet 18, while soldiers as young as 13 have sworn allegiance to Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam. But most child warriors belong to rebel groups, where how much they fight depends on how desperately their services are needed. The mujahedin of Afghanistan have boys as young as + nine battling Kabul. In Burma twelve-year-olds are recruited by the Karen rebels to defend their jungle territory. In El Salvador the F.M.L.N. is an equal-opportunity guerrilla group, one of the few to allow young girls to bear arms alongside the boys.

Our memories of war are haunted most by the images of children fighting. Impassive Khmer Rouge kids, taught to massacre civilians, even their parents. Idi Amin's army of thugs, murderous preteens in wraparound sunglasses. Iranian ten-year-olds sent unarmed into battle as human minesweepers, with pictures of Khomeini pinned to their shirts. Now Mozambique is at the vanguard of the unconscionable. The Renamo rebels fighting the Chissano regime have become infamous for their instrumentalizados, children kidnaped by Renamo troops and not just trained to fight but also forced to slaughter and maim civilians.

Children are not always coerced. Sometimes they volunteer, or at least the generals insist that such is the case. In areas where most of today's fighting is waged -- Africa, Southeast Asia, the Middle East -- demography is destiny. Manpower is scarce, and nearly half the population is under 15. With the right encouragement, children can be ready, even eager, to take up arms.

Nonetheless, The Lord of the Flies was wrong. Yes, boys have a primitive urge to fight, an easily tapped aggression. But killing is not instinctive; it is an acquired taste, something that grownups must pass on. Children also have a deep-rooted desire to please their elders. War satisfies both needs: to a child, a war is a fight with adult supervision. Because they so crave love from adults, children can be taught very quickly to hate. After that, killing is easier.

History suggests that there is nothing new about child warriors, partly because in centuries past youngsters were looked upon as small adults, and thus the sight of them in combat was less horrifying. But there is a difference between being trained to fight and being used to make a symbolic point. In the Children's Crusade of the 13th century, the thousands of boys and girls who were dispatched from Europe to the Holy Land went off unarmed and undefended; their very youth was meant to awe the enemy. Most died of disease or starvation along the way; many of those who survived were captured by pirates and enslaved.

Battle carries its own excitements, and children are as susceptible to those fevers as adults. Arn Chorn was ten when he was sent to Wat Aik, a Buddhist temple in Cambodia converted into a concentration camp by the Khmer Rouge. He spent two years there, a witness to daily butcheries, and he endured them in a state of numbness. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, he was sent to fight with the Khmer Rouge army. It was a new kind of terror, but he quickly got used to life on patrol in swampy jungles. Frightened the first time he fired a carbine, he grew adept at it and quickly graduated to an AK-47.

Taken in by an American family in 1980, Arn Chorn is now 22 and a college student in Rhode Island. He understands in retrospect that he was brainwashed into becoming a Khmer Rouge. Yet he also remembers how thrillingly fright and excitement mixed. He can still describe the sweaty terror before an attack, squatting in the reeds, trembling. Then the fear metabolized into adrenaline, enhanced by the delight of pumping an automatic rifle. "Sometimes," he says, "you enjoy yourself in battle."

In Afghanistan all boys are urged to fight, even by their parents. Death on the battlefield is not just an honor, it is also the Muslim's guarantee of eternal life. In Burma, where Karen rebels have been fighting for independence for 41 years, combat has become the family business. Northern Ireland is not officially at war, but a state of siege between two religions has made violence the expected. As Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychologist, dryly says, "It's the children who don't throw stones that are abnormal."

And then there is Los Angeles. Gang violence doesn't fit the Geneva Convention standard of war: there has been no invasion, no mass uprising against an oppressor, no minefields, aerial bombings or refugee camps. Instead, there are small armies of youths fighting one another and the police. Gang violence is combat stripped of all the familiar rationales. It is the closest thing the U.S. has to battle within its borders, and many of the children emerge from the streets of Los Angeles more psychologically scarred than the young mujahedin who patrol the mountain passes of Afghanistan.

In all these places, the shock of seeing children fighting fades. It's like entering a darkened room: rather quickly the eyes adjust to a dimmer light. The mind grows accustomed to the sight of a little boy among the men, wearing the same uniform, carrying the same weapon, walking with the same tired swagger. It is from a distance that the reality of child soldiers appalls. Even people living close to the fighting find it easier to forget. Hamed Karzai, the urbane spokesman of the Afghan rebel government, spends most of his time mediating between rival mujahedin factions. Sipping tea in the Pakistan city of Peshawar, 40 miles from the Afghan border, he seems faintly amused at the notion of young boys fighting on the side of the rebels. He allows that there might be some children who take part in battle. "It is a game to them," he says with an indulgent smile. "They want to play at being soldiers." Karzai might be surprised at how well they play the game.