When war and children collide

The tragic impact of war on children has taken center stage this month in international forums.

First, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has just issued a report, based on insights from Radhika Coomaraswamy, special representative on children and armed conflict, that underscores the effect of war on millions of children world-wide. Second, the UN Security Council will debate this topic Tuesday under the leadership of Council president Jorge Voto-Bernales. Third, pretrial hearings have begun for the International Criminal Court case against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, who is charged with forcing children, some as young as 10 years old, into his militia.

These actions take me back to the late 1990s, when I served as American ambassador to Angola and as a member of the UN-led Peace Commission that sought to consolidate a peace agreement and end decades of civil war that cost a half million lives and drove 4 million people from their homes. The memories of that period still haunt me.

I remember going to camps where both government soldiers and rebel soldiers from UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) were being disarmed and prepared for return to civilian life.

I expected to see grizzled old fighters, especially since both the government and UNITA armies affirmed that they did not recruit child soldiers. In fact, we saw thousands of children, many of whom had carried AK-47s that were almost as big as they were.

I remember talking to a group of teenagers, all of whom had been subjected to forced conscription well before their 18th birthdays. Most were porters or messengers, but many had been forced into battle and had taken human life.

We talked about the future. These children were more frightened by the prospects of peace than they had ever been on the battlefield. They knew they had no schooling, no skills, no prospects, and no place to go. Their homes had been destroyed or their families didn't want them back, afraid of their influence on the other children in the family. We put together programs for these child soldiers – a little money, a kit of food and clothing, and transportation to their places of origin. But these children lacked the most important commodities of childhood: hope and faith in the future.

At psychosocial counseling centers, Angolan and international counselors helped children cope with the horrors of war they had witnessed. One technique was to ask them to express their grief and shock through artwork. I was startled by the degrees of violence portrayed in the drawings. The pictures were so filled with blood, the organizers kept running out of red paint. It was as if an entire generation was enduring post-traumatic stress disorder.

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