July 17, 2006

The Role of Young IDPs as Child Soldiers

by Charles Geisler and Niousha Roshani

The collateral damage of war falls disproportionately on civilians, including children and adolescents. Such damage occurs with high levels of impunity and is quickly forgotten. In countries like Colombia, warfare and its displacing effects have continued for three generations. The children of displaced families are not only the victims of crime and violence, but large numbers are regularly recruited by warring factions as child combatants, thus reproducing and prolonging hostilities. Those committed to peace accords in Colombia face a grim reality: abundant supplies of adolescent soldiers may postpone peace negotiations indefinitely.

Colombia’s population is currently estimated to be 43,700,000, with 16,407,000 under the age of 18. With more than three million reported IDPs—and many more unreported—Colombia has the second-highest population of IDPs in the world after the Sudan. The UNDP and NGO sources believe that youth comprise approximately 50 percent of the internally displaced population. According to Colombia’s Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES), 86 percent of all Internally Displaced People (IDP) households include one or more children. Of these displaced children, 45 percent are 14 or younger, while 20 percent are between 3 and 10 years old.

Displacement usually means a series of calamities—homelessness, physical torture, severe trauma and exposure to atrocities, malnutrition, little formal education, loss of family members, and risks of many kinds, including constant and recurring military recruitment. For many children without parents, joining a fighting force is a matter of survival. It renders the distinction between forced and voluntary recruitment academic.

It is estimated that 14,000 to 20,000 children are serving in the armed forces in Colombia, placing Colombia fourth in the world for reliance on child soldiers, following Myanmar, Liberia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Human Rights Watch, at least one of every four irregular combatants in Colombia's civil war is under eighteen years old.

As in many countries, the Government of Colombia seldom provides IDP children in flight with special programs or security measures. However, some attention by both national and international organizations is geared towards former child soldiers and their rehabilitation back into society. Absent this, such combatants are faced with physical and sexual abuse, exploitation and abduction, trafficking and renewed recruitment, especially when separated from their families and support networks. Nongovernmental organisations are active in treating children for malnutrition and disease, but rarely do more. Child soldiers seeking to exit military livelihoods often face community lasting distrust and scorn in the local civil environments to which they might flee.

The tragedy of child militias in Colombia and elsewhere then is both personal and societal. Globally, hundreds of thousands of displaced children are catapulted into violent lives that serve adult purposes. Whole societies suffer to the extent that vast “reserve armies” of children perpetuate cultures of war rather than peace, both because of dysfunctional socialization and because incentives to enter peace negotiations are reduced by a virtually unrestrained supply of combatants, regardless of age. Those who lobby for peace must lobby strenuously for an end to internal displacement and the military recruitment of children it spawns.

The mortality rate of Colombia’s IDP children may be as high as 120 per 1,000, compared to 21 per 1,000 in this age group for the population as a whole. This former rate may be due to repeated displacements while hiding from armed forces. Conditions of displacement put at risk the entire range of rights guaranteed children by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), including survival, protection, and development essentials such as education. According to the IDMC, displaced children may be denied the right to education for lack of proper documentation, inability to pay school fees, racial discrimination, and language barriers among many other factors.

It is difficult to obtain an accurate number of IDPs in Colombia for many reasons. Displaced people of all ages refrain from identifying themselves as displaced for fear of further persecution and discrimination. The guerrilla and paramilitary groups have been known to eliminate IDPs for fear of witnesses providing information on military activities. Registration as a displaced person can also reduce chances of gaining employment or access to education and health services for children. Furthermore, most IDPs come from poor backgrounds in which identification cards are uncommon.

How can facts so troubling warrant so little public attention in Colombia? Difficulties in counting IDPs only partially account for why IDP child combatants in Colombia often go largely unnoticed. Colombia is trapped in a displacement-recruitment syndrome. As noted, displacement from armed conflicts begets youth with stark survival choices. According to Human Rights Watch, these adolescents and children are being recruited in growing numbers to fight adult wars, which in turn fuel new rounds of violence and displacement. These intensify the demand for combatants, both young and old. This pernicious cycle has become a way of life in Colombia, invisible in part because it is the norm. Some Colombian children have spent their entire lives as militants and without childhoods.

Many other factors enter this recipe for oblivion. To be sure, few military groups want to advertise that their cause rides on the backs of children. Shame no doubt leads to secrecy as well as denial. Second, as minors, children lack rights to represent themselves. Often they are unaware they have human rights. They are at the mercy of their society and their society is at war. Related to this, child IDPs typically lack identification documents and dwell in social limbo; their disappearance into combat roles easily goes unnoticed, at least officially. Moreover, there is no penalty for such oversight. The Government of Colombia can look the other way with impunity and has threatened organizations such as CODHES for purveying negative images of Colombia in the eyes of the international community.

There are other social factors at play. Elite Colombian society often associates IDP children with poverty, misery and other taunts to their national respectability. There is a tendency to blame combatants rather than oligarchs for enduring civil war, in short, blaming the victim, including children. Child combatants inhabit a troubled cultural zone in Colombia no less than their counterparts in other world regions. The lack of census data for such children and more detailed studies of their precarious lives only add to their obscurity and to public disavowals of responsibility.

But what exactly are the correlations between displacement and child soldiering? What are the consequences, and how might they be prevented? Displacement and child militia are not simply unrelated outcomes of war; they are often deeply inter-connected. Whether during war or “peace,” there actually appears to be a strong relationship between the risk of recruitment during displacement and the risk of displacement as an outcome of recruitment.

Yet, it seems clear that the most serious risks for children occur in countries in the midst of intense armed conflict, where the numbers of both IDPs and child soldiers often rise. Countries suffering the worst trends in child recruitment, both in numbers and violent treatment, have also tended to produce the largest populations of IDPs and refugees in the world, including literally millions of children.

The disconnect between the IDP status of children and military recruitment is part of a larger syndrome that Colombia and other countries relying on child combatants are experiencing. As displacement spreads, poverty and insecurity spread, and families separate. Children are abducted into or seek out military roles to survive. Military “solutions” to civil difficulties leads to yet more displacement and re-recruitment of child combatants. This is almost surely a lead factor in Human Rights Watch’s conclusion last year that children are being recruited in growing numbers. The displacement-recruitment-displacement cycle has become a way of life in Colombia.

In a rare public comment, Commander Mariana of the FARC-EP’s Thematic Work Group acknowledged and defended the FARC-EPs continued recruiting of children:” We do have large numbers of young persons over 15 years of age in our ranks. They dream of a better country for their families, for themselves, and for all those who endure similar conditions. Therefore they made the decision to enlist in the FARC. We even admit, in exceptional cases, persons under that age, because neither the State nor society, nor even their families, are prepared to offer them a chance to lead a decent life. Let’s not be shocked at this. Instead, let’s look at the options that this society that criticizes us offers them: street begging, joining delinquent gangs in deprived urban districts, resorting to prostitution, joining gangs of paid killers…there should be no war…unfortunately, those who hold the economic and political power in our country have left the Colombian people no other option than an uprising”.

The FARC position is self-justifying. Similar logics may exist within press releases of the Colombian military and paramilitary groups. None would take kindly to our labelling their recruitment of vulnerable populations as predatory. Still, our best estimates suggest that the overall numbers of child soldiers and those that come from the ranks of the displaced remain alarmingly high and do not represent voluntary choice.

There is little doubt that reintegrating displaced children successfully into society—those with and those without military experience—can help reduce the potential for future human rights violations in the Colombia and address the psychological, health, economic, and educational needs of vulnerable segment of the population. We suggest further benefits follow from reintegration and concerted prevention of child recruitment: an accelerated peace process. Though direct evidence for this claim would take years to assemble, the proposition seems strong on its face. Warring factions in Colombia will treat the resolution of their differences cavalierly if the pipeline of children keeps producing new recruits. At least one of every four combatants in Colombia’s internal war is a child. Colombia’s reliance on children to turn the wheels of war is in some ways a modern remake of the Thirteenth Century Children’s Crusade. Orgies of bloodshed and human displacement could be avoided if children were not sacrificed for such causes.

The Government of Colombia could take proactive steps—and win significant support for its position in the civil war—were it to acknowledge the problem and renounce any further recruitment of children soldiers. It should unhesitatingly support nongovernmental organisations, national and other, that have taken up the cause of children soldiers and their social reintegration.

The vicious cycle that has been described here is morally repulsive. It is also a poorly understood obstacle to peace-making in Colombia’s troubled social landscape. Perhaps among the children that are spared military servitude are the future leaders who will, for good reason, never let this tragedy reoccur in Colombia.

Charles Geisler is a professor of development sociology at Cornell University. His research on human displacement focuses on evictions from parks and protected areas and on the displacement effects of global conflict and terrorism.

Niousha Roshani is a graduate student in International Development at Cornell University. Her work and research in Colombia has been on improving assistance programs for displaced children in Apartadó, northern Antioquia.

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