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The Eyes of a Child Soldier
By Brishti Bandyopadhyay and Chitra Padmanabhan; Illustration by Sudheer Nath
August 5, 2000: A child is recognised everywhere as a symbol of innocence. Those who fight wars know this fact. And the more brutal among them use this knowledge to do the most terrible thing. They force children to fight the wars that they have started.
This is what the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) does in the West African country of Sierra Leone. The title of the group suggests that it is performing heroic acts. What it actually does is just the opposite. It begins its attacks on government forces by sending waves of children in front. The idea is to unnerve the opponents. And the children come directly in the line of their gunfire.
The mature adults stay behind - their survival instincts are strong. But they have another impressive sounding name for it - political and war strategy.
Sierra Leone has lately been in the news for a war that seems to never end. For years the RUF has been fighting the forces of government. In the last couple of months, the United Nations (UN) sent in its peace-keeping force into the country. Consisting of soldiers from various countries, the force was led by an Indian, Major General Vijay Kumar Jetley.
What shook the Indian soldiers was the fact that the frontline of the RUF always consisted of children. They were not prepared for such a reality. It was a tactic of the RUF to throw the peacekeeping force off-guard. A peace-keeping force is supposed to just maintain peace. Its rules do not permit it to take the first step in fighting. The last two months were full of crisis for the peace-keeping force when the RUF took hostage more than 20 Indian soldiers, who escaped much later.
It is said that the RUF began in 1991 when tribes which lived in the far flung areas of Sierra Leone felt the need to protest their ill-treatment at the hands of the richer sections of society.
But somewhere along the way, the RUF forgot what it started out to do. Greed is the factor that characterizes the fight for power in Sierra Leone today. The fight for power is all about the fight for areas, which have some of the richest diamond mines in the African continent. The diamonds continue to be smuggled out through the neighbouring county of Liberia. In fact many say that the RUF is now controlled by a Liberian by the name of Charles Taylor whose main interest lies in the diamond fields under RUF control. The fields are believed to generate $ 300 million in revenue.
The RUF is one of the world's most hated armies today. Mainly because of what it has done to the children.
It has forced the children into unimaginable situations of killing or seeing killings - even children as young as eight or nine. The fact that children can easily carry the light weapons that are mostly used in internal wars has created a terrible situation for the children. If they do not do as the RUF says they can lose their lives after seeing many others killed.
