Pitara Kids Home > News > World News
War Memorial for Child Soldiers
By Team Pitara
September 23, 2000: "Everyone was dying. You saw the legs or hands of your friends lying in front of you. It was so horrifying, you couldn't make sense of it. It was hell… Boys lay on the ground for three or four days without being buried. We were fighting around their corpses." This is how Rashid, an Ethiopian high school student, described his experience of fighting on the Badme front in 1999.
More than 300,000 child soldiers in the world There are more than 300,000 child soldiers - both boys and girls - fighting adult wars around the globe, like Rashid. All are under 18; some are as young as seven or eight years old.
Most of them fight in the frontline where they are the first to face attacks from the opposition's armed forces, while others are used as spies, messengers, sentries, porters, servants and, often, to lay and clear landmines.
Simply put, they are the first to be in the line of fire.
To remember the thousands of children who have been killed, wounded, detained in camps or gone missing in recent years, a special "Children's War Memorial" was unveiled during the United Nations (UN) Millennium Assembly at New York last week.
A new treaty banning the use of child soldiersBefore the ceremony, 68 governments signed a new international treaty prohibiting the participation of children in armed conflict. The credit for this treaty goes to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, a group of different organisations working in 30 countries.
The Coalition had demanded that a universal standard be adopted that will raise the minimum age to 18 for all forms of military recruitment.
The ceremony itself started with a reminder to the audience from a former Khmer Rouge child soldier from Cambodia, Loung Ung, "For every child soldier, remember there is a child. On behalf of all those children unable to make their voices heard, please take this chance to stop any more of our names being added to this terrible list."
