Comic Book Civil War: 'Unknown Soldier'

'Unknown Soldier' is not your normal comic book. From the New York Times:

The series, written by Joshua Dysart and illustrated by Alberto Ponticelli, is set in Uganda and includes a reference guide with more than 20 entries, including background on the brutal rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army; the peace activist Abdulkadir Yahya Ali, who was killed; and the Acholi, an ethnic group from the northern part of the country.

Unknown Soldier, published by Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, is about Dr. Lwanga Moses, a Ugandan whose family fled the country for the United States when he was 7. He returns as an adult in 2002 with his wife, Sera, also a physician, hoping to put their medical skills to use in a part of the country that has experienced civil war for 15 years. He finds a world filled with violence, boys used as soldiers and girls punished for innocent acts like riding bicycles. Along the way he also encounters an Angelina Jolie-type character in Margaret Wells, an actress and activist.

Chris Blattman thinks it is "Tasteful. Thoughtful. Compelling. Gripping. Historically accurate"

Some Fact Checking Around Child Soldiers

Foreign Policy Magazine recently did a story on debunking some misinterpretations and myths about child soldiers. They tackle:

• Child Soldiering Is a Human Rights Issue- It's much more than that. It is also a geostrategic and development issue. Child soldiers are usually depicted as victims. That's accurate: Exploited, torn from their families, deprived of their education, and forced into battle, child soldiers are truly casualties of war. But they're also assailants. Child soldiers are cheap and efficient weapons in asymmetric warfare. Accounts from the field tell of soldiers who are near free to recruit, cheap to feed, and quick to follow orders.
• There Are 300,000 Child Soldiers in the World-Who knows? No one has ever made a serious attempt at surveying the world's child soldier population. This popularly cited number was touted by members of several child advocacy groups in the mid-1990s as a way to attract attention to the plight of child soldiers. But if this figure was ever true, it isn't now. Wars employing child soldiers, such as those in Angola, Liberia, and Nepal, have ended; the numbers have surely shrunk to match.
• Most Child Soldiers Are African Boys-Not even close. You can forget about the popular image that the phrase "child soldier" evokes: a pre-adolescent African boy, perhaps doped, wielding an AK-47 with anger burning in his eyes. Many child soldiers are not armed combatants. They include messengers, porters, spies, and sex slaves. So great is the diversity of tasks that many advocates now prefer the less punchy but more accurate term, "children associated with fighting forces."
• Globalization Created Child Soldiering- Wrong. Child soldiering is often portrayed as something new -- a product of the post-Cold War flow of cheap guns and money to the world's most failed states. In fact, child soldiers have been around for millennia. The Spartans of ancient Greece, for example, relied heavily on boys as young as seven. Later, the British Navy recruited young lads to serve as cabin boys and cannon-prepping "powder monkeys" throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Large numbers of children fought on both sides in the U.S. Civil War.
• Child Soldiers Are No Match for Western Militaries- Only in conventional combat. Asymmetrical conflicts, however, are another story. Take suicide bombing, which child soldiers have carried out in the Palestinian territories, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and Chechnya. There is little that trained soldiers can do other than guess that a nearby child is in fact a suicide bomber. In Afghanistan, a 14-year-old was responsible for the first killing of a NATO soldier -- likely just one of the estimated 8,000 child soldiers who do or have worked as part of the Taliban's forces.
• Our Current Approach to Ending Child Soldiering Is Working- The international community primarily deals with child soldiers through deterrence (prosecuting the adult recruiters) and demobilization (taking away the children's guns and sending them home). Neither approach goes far enough.

Roméo Dallaire says Omar Khadr is a child soldier

There has been some controversy in Canada about whether the Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr was a child soldier. Liberal Senator Roméo Dallaire says he was:

The [Canadian] federal government is desperately trying to redefine the term "child soldier." While speaking in the House of Commons, Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, revealed a double standard. He spoke sympathetically of meeting child soldiers in Burundi and stated that in that case, dire poverty and economic pressures cause children to be recruited as soldiers. Conversely, when speaking of Omar Khadr, who was also a minor forced into combat by factors beyond his control, Obhrai declared that "(we) should be very careful when we start saying that the terrorists at Guantanamo should be given rights."

You would never know based on its handling of the Khadr case, but in February, 2007, our government actually joined more than 50 other states in agreeing to the Paris Principles and Commitments. These include, among other things, a definition of the term "child soldier" and guidelines for integrating former child combatants back into society. This key international pledge has been markedly absent from the government's strategy for dealing with a Canadian child soldier.

The prime minister, along with some other Canadians, is clearly uncomfortable defending Omar Khadr's rights, but this does not mean our government should stick its head in the sand. When Canada signs a treaty, it should mean something. We should not look for loopholes or try to change the rules of the game as soon as our resolve is put to the test. We should not seek to evade our obligations, legal, moral, or otherwise. We should keep our word, and respect both the spirit and the letter of the law.

Liberal Senator Roméo Dallaire travelled to Washington in January to press for a halt of Omar Khadr's Guantanamo prosecution.

Review Cases of Guantanamo Detainees Imprisoned as Juveniles

Human Rights Watch says:

The US Department of Justice should expedite the review and provide education and other rehabilitation assistance for five detainees at Guantanamo who have been held there since they were children, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. The detainees were brought to Guantanamo between the ages of 15 and 17, and have now been in detention there for more than six years.

The five detainees are:

• Mohammed el Gharani - a Chadian who was brought to Guantanamo at the age of 15. Although a federal court ruled in January 2009 that the government's evidence is too weak to justify el Gharani's continued confinement, he remains in Guantanamo.
• Mohammad Jawad - an Afghan brought to Guantanamo at the age of 16 or 17, who has been charged with attempted murder by a military commission. He was reportedly subjected to torture and other abuse while in US custody, and has attempted suicide at least once.
• Omar Khadr - a Canadian brought to Guantanamo at the age of 15, who has been charged with murder by a military commission. Previously held in prolonged solitary confinement, he also reports having been subjected to torture and abuse.
• Mohammad Khan Tumani - a Syrian brought to Guantanamo at the age of 17, who has as reportedly subjected to physical and psychological abuse . He has not been charged with an offense.
• Fahd Abdullah Ahmed Ghazni - a Yemeni brought to Guantanamo at the age of 17. Although he was cleared by the US government to leave Guantanamo more than a year ago, he remains in detention.

Child Soldiers on Law & Order: SVU

Via GG, the latest from the Invisible Children blog:

Alright everyone, get your TiVo’s ready. Our good friend John Prendergast at Enough has been working with the people at NBC on a special episode of “Law & Order: SVU” that will feature a back story of Child Soldiers abducted by the LRA. The episode will air on Tuesday, March 31st.

(HT: Chris Blattman)

Missing Somalis in Minneapolis

Approximately two dozen Somali boys (mostly teenagers) have gone missing in Minneapolis. It has been confirmed that they were recruited by terrorist groups. All of the men were from families with single mom's and are told that they must prove their dedication to Somalia and Islam. Once they get to the camps, they are threatened about being forced into Guantanamo by Americans. It is unclear how they are recruited. Somalis have had a difficult time assimilating into the United States. From Talk of the Nation:

The FBI believes the young men were radicalized and recruited here in the U.S., then sent to Somalia. There's concern they'll return to the U.S. to carry out attacks. It started about two years ago. Somali-American youth in Minneapolis would suddenly go missing, telling their parents they were going out with friends or just off to do some laundry — only to board planes to Africa. About 20 young men have disappeared so far, and they are believed to have traveled to Somalia to join a terrorist group.

American counterterrorism officials' worst fears are personified by a young Somali-American named Shirwa Ahmed. He left Minneapolis about 18 months ago to join an Islamic militia in Somalia called al-Shabab. Then, last October, he drove a car full of explosives into a crowd in Somaliland, killing 27 people.

The disappearance of these Midwestern Somali-Americans comes at a time when counterterrorism officials are watching the growing alliance between al-Shabab and al-Qaida. One of the questions at Wednesday's hearing was whether the young men were actually being recruited by the Somali terror group.

A security risk because the young men coming from the States arrive in the middle of Somalia's civil war armed with little more than their faith and a desire to help.

Girl Child Soldiers

Dr. Myriam Denov draws from her experience in Sierra Leone to focus on girl soldiers:

First, whether in the heat of conflict or within postwar programming, girls are, for the most part, rendered invisible and marginalized. During conflict, the roles that they play are frequently deemed peripheral and insignificant by governments, national and international NGOs, policy-makers, and program developers. In the aftermath of war, girls continue to be marginalized within the realms of education, economics, and are frequently discriminated against within formal disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) processes, as well as within the context of their families and communities.

Second, in spite of this profound invisibility and marginalization, girls are fundamental to the war machine – their operational contributions are integral and critical to the overall functioning of armed groups.

Third, girls in fighting forces contend with overwhelming experiences of victimization, perpetration, and insecurity. During conflict, girls are subjected to grave violations of their human rights through forced recruitment, killing, maiming, sexual violence, sexual exploitation, abduction, forced marriage, and increased exposure to HIV/AIDS. Many are also forced to participate in brutal acts of violence. In the aftermath of conflict, girls arguably bear a form of secondary victimization through socio-economic marginalization and exclusion, as well as the ongoing threats to their health and personal security.

Finally, girls in fighting forces are not simply silent victims, but active agents and resisters during armed conflict. Girls’ made remarkable attempts to defend and protect themselves during situations of severe violence and insecurity, as well as efforts to bring about change for themselves and by themselves. Challenging the predominant portrayals of girls as emblematic victims, girls attempted to avoid, minimize, or resist wartime abuses, patriarchal power structures, and the culture of violence that surrounded them.

In light of these research findings, an alternative approach is essential -- one that gives due regard to the ways in which girls in fighting forces are perceived, represented, and conceptualized.

Rather than focusing solely on girls’ vulnerability and victimization, it is essential also to direct our attention to their self-efficacy, resilience, and skills. Moreover, given their significant presence and multiple roles within fighting forces, girls’ experiences and perspectives should be considered as central and indispensable to understandings and analyses of war and political violence, and not regarded as peripheral or, unwittingly or wittingly, rendered invisible.

Child Soldier First Witness at the ICC

A former Congolese child soldier told the ICC at the trial of Thomas Lubanga that armed troops plucked him off the street on his way home from school and sent him to a military camp.

The witness, whose name and age were not released, told the International Criminal Court he was in the fifth grade of primary school in the town of Fataki, eastern Congo, when he was involuntarily recruited. He was the first witness to appear at the trial of former Congo warlord Thomas Lubanga following opening statements on the previous two days by the prosecution and defense.

However, later in the day, retracted his testimony on Wednesday, prompting a probe into witness protection. Having testified in the morning that he was recruited by the accused Thomas Lubanga's militia and taken to a training camp, the witness later told the court in The Hague his evidence had been incorrect.

Lubanga's trial is the first since the court was created in 2002 as the world's only permanent war crimes tribunal, and the proceedings are being closely watched for the precedents they are setting. Lubanba is charged with "enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15" into his militia and "using them to participate actively in hostilities."

Emmanuel Jal - Former Child Soldier Turned Rapper

From Reuters:

Sudanese child soldier turned global hip hop star Emmanuel Jal has both embraced rap as a way to reach a global audience and distanced himself from what he says is a tendency to glorify violence. Jal, who fought with the Sudan People's Liberation Army for five years as a child and guesses he is 28 years old, tells his story in detail in the documentary "War Child."

For Jal, who now lives in London, music is a form of therapy that allows him to sort through feelings of guilt while serving as a role model for child victims of war.

He has set up the Gua Africa charity and is planning to build a school in Leer, his village in southern Sudan.

Child Soldiers Accountability Act Signed Into Law

President Bush signed into law the Child Soldiers Accountability act, which "makes it a federal crime to recruit knowingly or to use soldiers under the age of 15 and permits the United States to prosecute any individual on US soil for the offense, even if the children were recruited or served as soldiers outside the United States." The law imposes penalties of up to 20 years, or up to life in prison if their action resulted in the child’s death. It also allows the United States to deport or deny entry to individuals who have knowingly recruited children as soldiers.

The legislation was introduced by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois and adopted unanimously by both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate in September 2008.

In a statement issued on October 3, Senator Durbin said: “The United States must not be a safe haven for those who exploit children as soldiers. Period. The use of children as combatants is one of the most despicable human rights violations in the world today and affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of boys and girls who are used as combatants, porters, human mine detectors and sex slaves. The power to prosecute and punish those who violate the law will send a clear signal that the U.S. will in no way tolerate this abhorrent practice.”

Child Recruitment of those Under 18

Human Rights Watch on Child Soldiers a Global Report 2008:

"Progress towards a global standard prohibiting the military recruitment or use in hostilities of children is hampered by continued recruitment of under-18s into peacetime armies. At least 63 governments – including the United Kingdom and United States – allow voluntary recruitment of under-18s, despite the age of adulthood being set at 18 in many countries. Young recruits considered too young to vote or buy alcohol are subjected to military discipline, hazardous activity and are vulnerable to abuse. Active targeting of children, often from deprived backgrounds, raises questions on the depth of these governments’ commitment to child protection and whether such recruitment can be genuinely voluntary."

Senator Romeo Dallaire on Khadr

Senator Roméo Dallaire says the U.S. and Canada have descended to the level of the terrorists they pursue by flouting international law and allowing Omar Khadr to be prosecuted for war crimes at Guantanamo Bay.

"They are operating on a law of their own," Dallaire told the House of Commons foreign affairs human rights committee yesterday. "The (trial in Guantanamo) is flawed, it is illegal, and we're letting it happen."

Update on Omar Khadr

A US military judge dismissed the argument that Guantanamo’s youngest detainee, Omar Khadr, was a child soldier when captured in Afghanistan and therefore in need of protection and not prosecution. US Army Colonel Peter Brownback’s ruling clears the way for Khadr’s trial, which will be the first war crimes trial in history of anyone under the age of eighteen.

'Kassim the Dream'

Filmmaker Kief Davidson was inspired to make the movie 'Kassim The Dream' after seeing a TV special on Ouma, kidnapped from school at age 6 by the rebel army of Yoweri Museveni, who found sanctuary and rehabilitation through boxing. Ouma, who learned to box in the army, fled to the United States when he was 19 using a visa given to him for a military boxing championship. He arrived homeless and unable to speak English, at one point handing out pizza fliers before finding a boxing gym, where his talent became apparent.

Davidson tells the story of Ouma's first journey back to Uganda since he fled to the United States in 1998.

Dehistoricizing the Agency of Children who Participate in Conflict

A recent blog post by the small wars journal on child soldiers through various quotes claims that the phenomenon of child soldiers is a recent development in history indicating that children have no agency whatsoever in their involvement in military activity and violence.

This is simply false:

1. Children have been involved in conflicts throughout history. See Rosen's Armies of the Young
2. Much of the time children choose to participate in conflict either because of their political beliefs, vigilantism, or as a survival tactic. In such circumstances such as war, children choose to do what is in their best interest, displaying agency in their decision making processes.
3. The focus should not be on vulnerable children but on the circumstances that make children vulnerable which are created due to structural and systematic problems in the international system that children through their participation in violence choose to resist.
4. Contrary to popular assumption children are not always innocent and vulnerable, but rather this portrayal of children is a particular social construction of childhood. See James and Prout's Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood

Lam Tungwar

Lam Tungwar is a former child soldier from Sudan who has turned musican. Recently appointed UN Habitat Ambassador, his main mission is to address issues affecting the youth in East Africa and to get youth to turn in their guns. He started the South Sudanese Artistes Association which comprises of more than 2000 Sudanese entertainers in and outside the country. Lam performs in Kenya and Sudan and preaches peace and tolerance in four languages: his own, English, Kiswahili and Arabic.His story was written by South Sudanese journalist Evans Maendeh, in a book called Child Soldier.

What happens after asylum? the case of a former child soldier in the US

See the New York Times article: Taking the War out of Child Soldier
Nina Bernstein writes:

The teenager stepped off an airplane at Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 8 and asked for asylum. Days before, he had been wielding an automatic weapon as a child soldier in Ivory Coast. Now he had only his name, Salifou Yankene, and a phrase in halting English: “I want to make refugee.”

Salifou had good reason to be confused and distrustful of the system he had entered when he sought asylum. Like many of the 5,000 unaccompanied minors apprehended each year, he had no valid identity documents. But based on the birth date he gave, he had been placed in a juvenile shelter in Queens.

Within days, after confiding to a counselor that he sometimes heard voices and had once attempted suicide, he was transferred to a mental hospital’s pediatric ward, where he was so medicated, he said, that he could barely move.

Discharged in time for Thanksgiving dinner at the children’s residence, he was suddenly declared to be over 18, not 17 years and 7 months as he maintained, based on an immigration service dentist’s interpretation of his X-rays — a practice that many doctors contest as unreliable. An adult immigration detention center refused to take him, so he was locked up in a county jail in western New Jersey.

His experience evokes the larger international confusion over how to draw the line between juveniles and adults, and what treatment is best for former child soldiers. Should they be legally barred from asylum as persecutors or protected as victims? How can they be healed, and who will help them?"

On Aug. 6, 2001, according to the 25-page affidavit he signed, his father and older sister were shot to death within earshot of the family home in Man, a market town in northwestern Ivory Coast. He remains tormented that as a 12-year-old he was powerless to protect his family when armed men ransacked the house and assaulted his mother.

His father, a civil servant in the defense ministry, had been politically active with an opposition party, but may also have dealt in arms and diamonds. He had been able to afford to send Salifou to a French school, where he excelled.

But after the murders of his father and sister, he fled with his mother, brother and two younger sisters. For three years, they lived in a roving camp for the displaced, and it was all they could do to stay alive.

Late in 2004, troops of the Mouvement Patriotique, the rebel faction that controlled the north, raided the camp for new recruits. As rebels grabbed Salifou and his younger brother, Abdul Razack, then about 13, their mother held on to Abdul’s arm, yelling that he was too young to take. To punish her, Salifou testified, one rebel chopped off Abdul’s hand with a machete. Abdul was left behind, but Salifou was thrown in the back of a truck with other boys and began two years as an unwilling child soldier among thousands — trained, armed, drugged and growing numb to violence.

Chris Blattman on Ishmael Beah's "A Long Way Gone"

The Australian has alleged that Ishmael Beah fabricated parts of his memoir, A Long Way Gone, on being a child solider in Sierra Leone. See Chris Blattman's post.

"Author Ishmael Beah's bestselling account of his time as a child soldier was proved factually flawed by a document found in a remote Sierra Leone schoolhouse. The school results for March 1993 showed the popular author attended the Centennial Secondary School throughout the January-March term, a time when he claimed in his heartrending book A Long Way Gone that he was already roaming the countryside as a child refugee. Beah, his New York publisher Sarah Crichton Books and his Australian co-publisher HarperCollins have furiously denied reports by The Weekend Australian in recent weeks that have undermined the credibility of his highly profitable book."

"Beah is estimated to have earned about $1 million from the book, which has already sold more than 650,000 copies. Beah, now 27, did spend some time as a child soldier during his country's civil war, but it appears likely to have been a few months around the age of 15 rather than two years from the age of 13 that he vividly describes in his book. The author, who now lives in New York and has been appointed by UNICEF as an advocate for child soldiers, this week dismissed The Australian's investigations as ridiculous and ill-motivated despite the steady accumulation of evidence that his account of his experiences did not add up."

Politicized Children are not to be Feared

Check out Chris Blattman's latest post and report on children in conflict. It challenges the common assumption that child soldiers or other children who have experienced conflict will be either traumatized by their experiences to a point where they are unproductive members of society. Rather, his new paper empirically proves that children who have experienced conflict become more civicly engaged.

Blog:
http://chrisblattman.blogspot.com/2008/01/young-veterans-traumatized-pariahs-or.html

Center for Global Development Paper:

http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/15221

Child or Adult?

The first U.S. war-crime tribunals since the Second World War era begin at the military base in Guantanamo Bay is stalled as new developments in Omar Khadr's case have stalled the court. Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan at age 15 after a 2002 battle with there left an Army medic dead. Born in Toronto, his case has drawn considerable attention as a child soldier who is the youngest prisoner held in extrajudicial detention by the United States. Last week, the Pentagon accidentally released evidence that revealed that although Khadr was present during the firefight, there was no other evidence that he had thrown a grenade to kill the US army medic.

While Khadr has managed to evade trial under the Military Commission, not because he was a child at the time of committing the alleged crime, but because of procedural complications, he is now being tried under a special U.S. war-crime tribunal.

The prosecution argues that age does not matter because The Military Commissions Act, which Congress passed in 2006, did not make a separate distinction for juveniles when it set up procedures for trying individuals classified by the government as enemy combatants.

However, Khadr's lawyers argue that this act, authorizing U.S. military tribunals, should not apply to Khadr because the alleged offenses occurred before the court was created in 2006.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been requested by various human rights groups to put pressure on the US so that Khadr either be tried under juvenile offender laws or be sent back to Canada.