Children in the Crossfire - Event Overview

I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

II. FOREWORD

III. CONFERENCE SUMMARY

IV. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

V. CONVERSATIONS WITH FORMER CHILD SOLDIERS

VI. PANEL PRESENTATIONS

VII. CASE STUDY PRESENTATIONS

VIII. FILMS AND VISUAL DISPLAYS

IX. APPENDICES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The proceedings of Children in the Crossfire: Prevention and Rehabilitation of Child Soldiers were prepared under the guidance and direction of U.S. Secretary of Labor, Elaine L . Chao, Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs,Arnold Levine, and Associate Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs, Martha Newton. The proceedings were edited by Chris Camillo, Meghan Cronin, Marcia Eugenio, Maury Mendenhall, Brianne Musser, Veronica Puente-Duany, Deepa Ramesh, Jill Szczesny and Ami Thakkar of the Bureau for International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor. Contributors to this publication include: former Deputy Secretary Cam Findlay, Lourdes Balanon, Jo Becker, Virginia Brown, Marie de la Soudiere, Dr. Harendra de Silva,Nonoy Fajardo, Lloyd Feinberg, Manuel Fontaine, Shirley Gbujama, Christophe Gironde, Guenet Guebre-Christos, Jane Lowicki, Andrew Natsios, Olara A. Otunnu, Juan Somavia, Cheaka Toure, Adrien Tuyuga, Kathy Vandergrift, Charles Watmon, Mattito Watson, Mike Wessells, Bruce Wilkinson, and Ambassador Richard S.Williamson. Special thanks to David Bersch, Ashley Hoppin, Marty Lueders, Carmel Mulvany, Mary Westring, the International Labor Organization Division of Communications,World Vision, and Wray & Associates for their invaluable contributions to the event. The Department would also like to thank all of the participants who traveled from various countries to share their experiences at the conference, the youth delegates, staff, and teachers at John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring, Maryland who participated in the Parallel Youth Program, and the facilitators, health and security personnel who supported the program. Finally, the Department would like to acknowledge countless others who shared their time, knowledge and experience during the planning and execution of the conference. The proceedings represent an edited version of the event transcript. The views expressed by speakers, panel members, or others representing non-federal entities and contained in these proceedings do not necessarily reflect the official views of the United States Government or the U.S. Department of Labor.”

This publication is dedicated to the memory of Thomas B. Moorhead, former Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, whose leadership and dedication to the welfare of the world’s children served as a catalyst for the event..

FOREWORD BY

UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF LABOR
THE HONORABLE ELAINE L. CHAO

For nearly a decade now, the U.S. Department of Labor has been a leader in the global effort to eliminate abusive and exploitative child labor in developing countries around the world. In 2003, the Department launched a new initiative on one of the most horrific abuses that exists in the world today: the use of children as soldiers. Helping these children is so critical that I went to Africa this past December to formally launch a project to give rescued child soldiers opportunities to reclaim their lives and build better futures. Boys and girls as young as 7 years old participate in armed conflicts throughout the world, as spies, messengers, sex slaves, and combatants on the frontline. Caught in the crossfire, they are taken from the safety of their homes and schools and immersed in the deadly and horrific environment created by war and civil unrest. If and when these children are demobilized or returned to their homes, they face a future of uncertainty and fear. What can we do, as civilized nations, to prevent this terrible crime? And what means exist to help protect these children in the wake of conflict? The U.S. Department of Labor conference, Children in the Crossfire: Prevention and Rehabilitation of Child Soldiers, was organized in response to these important questions. The event brought together hundreds of representatives of foreign governments and the United Nations , members of nongovernmental organizations, technical experts, academics, and others interested in the welfare of war-affected children. Over the course of two days, we heard the experiences and best practices of experts who shared their first-hand knowledge about the most effective ways to combat this heinous practice. And we were joined by a group of very special young people from around the world – former child soldiers – who touched us with their stories and their courage for a better future. They provide hope that with the support of families, communities, and governments, we can help child soldiers to rebuild their lives.

The conference was a reminder to all of us that we can and must do more to help the world’s most vulnerable children.

Elaine L. Chao

PART III
CONFERENCE SUMMARY

On May 7-8, 2003, U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao hosted representatives of the world community as they gathered to participate in a U.S. Department of Labor Conference to heighten the global response to the exploitation of child soldiers. At the conference, Children in the Crossfire: Prevention and Rehabilitation of Child Soldiers, Secretary Chao announced a $13 million global initiative to support programs to counter the problem and to help former child soldiers around the world rebuild their lives. The panel discussions and case studies also resulted in the sharing of best practices and successful interventions among the world’s leading child welfare practitioners, government officials, and former child soldiers themselves.

The use of child soldiers as combatants, sex slaves, guards or spies in conflicts worldwide is well documented. More than 300,000 children under 18 are fighting in armed conflicts in over 30 countries worldwide. Of that total, approximately 120,000 can be found in Sub-Saharan Africa. While the majority of child soldiers are between the ages of 15 and 18, children as young as 7 or 8 years old are known to participate in armed conflicts. Testimonies by former child soldiers describing their fear, grief, and the violence of which they have been a part, have led the international community to condemn this practice as an affront to humanity and a clear violation of international law.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s commitment to address the issue is established under International Labor Organization Convention No. 182, ratified by the United States in 1999, which identifies the forced or compulsory recruitment of child soldiers, and other work that is harmful to the health, safety or morals of children, as worst forms of child labor. Between fiscal years 1995 and 2003, the Department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs has committed over $300 million in technical assistance to combat international child labor, and is currently working in over 60 countries to advance this commitment and assist vulnerable populations, including child soldiers. Furthermore, in December 2002, the United States ratified the United Nations Optional Protocol on the Use of Children in Armed Conflict, which raises the minimum compulsory recruitment age to 18 for service in State Party armed forces.

Using ILO Convention No. 182 as a starting point, the U.S. Department of Labor, led by Secretary Elaine L. Chao, is taking a leadership role in the global call to action by promoting discussion and analysis of ongoing efforts in war-torn countries to reintegrate former child soldiers and rebuild their communities. The labor perspective of the conference focused special attention on prevention and reintegration programs, including education and job skills training, which contribute to sustainable and equitable economic development, peace, and stability.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
CHILD SOLDIERS GLOBAL INITIATIVE

The Department allocated $13 million to support programs to prevent the use of child soldiers and to support the demobilization and reintegration process for children affected by armed conflict around the world. The global initiative includes funding for the following projects:

• A $3 million grant in support of educational training and services for former child soldiers in Northern Uganda. Implementing agency: International Rescue Committee;

• A $3 million grant in support of demobilization, rehabilitation, and education services for former child soldiers in Afghanistan. Implementing agency: UNICEF;

• A $7 million grant for activities to assist former child soldiers in seven countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Burundi, Rwanda, Colombia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Project activities will focus on the provision of vocational training and income-generation. Implementing agency: International Labor Organization/ International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC).

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

CAMERON FINDLAY, Deputy Secretary of Labor

Good afternoon. On behalf of Secretary Chao and the U.S. Department of Labor, I would like to welcome you all to the Children in the Crossfire Conference. I would, in particular, like to welcome to Washington, D.C. those of our guests who have traveled great distances to be here with us today from locations all over the world.

We have assembled here an incredibly diverse group of experts and participants for this conference. This group includes representatives of U.S. Government Agencies and foreign government officials, international organizations and local NGOs, members of the local and international media, youth from the Washington area, and youth from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The vision for this conference first came from Secretary of Labor, Elaine L. Chao. It was because of her personal commitment to putting an end to the plight of children recruited by force for use in armed conflicts that this event has become a reality.

Secretary Chao has made the issue of child soldiers a priority on her international agenda. As a former Director of the Peace Corps and former President of the United Way of America, Secretary Chao has brought to the Department of Labor a strong understanding of international affairs and a commitment to helping people overcome adversity.

It is this dynamic combination that makes her leadership on this issue so important.

It is with great pleasure that I introduce her to you now. Please join me in welcoming a voice for the world’s children, my boss, Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

ELAINE L. CHAO, U.S. Secretary of Labor

Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming.

I’d like to begin by asking you to do something a little unusual. Imagine that you are an African boy only 11 years old. A rebel army captures you and your family and takes you to their camp. When you arrive, you are greeted by the sight of decomposing bodies strewn everywhere. The soldiers shoot your father. Seeing this, another captive tries to escape. She is caught, assaulted, and brutally murdered. You are taken away and forced to fight for the people who killed your parents. When you try to resist, you are mercilessly beaten.

Or imagine that you are an innocent 16-year-old girl abducted by soldiers on the way home from school. You don’t want to go with them, but they threaten to take your clothes and shame you before strangers. You break down in tears, but they are unmoved. You are taken far away from home. You don’t know if you will ever see your parents again.

Or imagine that you are a child, forced to fight for a commander who says – as one commander actually did – “Children make good fighters because they think it’s all a game, so they’re fearless.”

These are just a few of the terrible stories of the world’s 300,000 child soldiers. These young people are forced to fight by government-sponsored armed forces or by other armed groups in more than 30 conflicts around the globe. And we believe these numbers are conservative estimates.

The plight of child soldiers offends the world’s sense of decency and the code of conduct of civilized nations. These children are forced to become soldiers, spies, guards, human shields, human minesweepers, servants, decoys, and sentries. Young girls are forced into prostitution. And when violence fails to intimidate, many children are drugged to make it easier to force them to perform horrendous acts of violence and cruelty. Some victims are as young as 7 or 8, and many more are 10 to 15. Children who are orphans, refugees, or victims of poverty or family alienation are particularly at risk.

But today, by our presence at this conference, we are telling the world in no uncertain terms that these horrors must end. The compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict is a barbaric practice condemned by the community of civilized nations. No child should have to experience the atrocities that child soldiers must face every day of their lives.

This conference sends a message of hope to these children. Over the next day-and-a-half, we will discuss ways to help these children reclaim their lives through education, rehabilitation and reintegration. This conference brings together key stakeholders in the concerned community, which is an important step towards global action. We have hundreds of representatives with us from nations and agencies around the world. I want to recognize the governments, U.N. agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, members of the media, and concerned individuals who have come here to work together. I want to thank each of you for accepting the invitation of the U.S. Department of Labor to participate.

The Department of Labor is involved in this issue for two reasons. First, as you know, the United States is a signatory to the International Labor Organization Convention No. 182. This convention names the forced recruitment of children for used in armed conflict as one of the worst forms of child labor. And second, President George W. Bush believes – as you do – that children have human dignity and must be protected from exploitation.

I pledge to you today that the U.S. Department of Labor will work with our counterparts around the world to help save children from the brutal life of a child soldier. The United States strongly believes that all nations should join together to pursue effective solutions. Many developing nations are showing their commitment to this cause by attending this conference, and we appreciate their participation.

There are two faces of the child soldier issue – the face of despair, and the face of redemption. In the next few moments, I want to show you both faces. First, in some video footage shot in Africa. And then, in the faces and voices of some very brave guests who are with us here today.

First, please join me in watching this video supplied by World Vision about Uganda. In this video, we visit a child soldier rehabilitation center. I want to commend the government of Uganda for its commitment to rehabilitating these children. This video is particularly interesting because it shows children engaging in mock battles. This kind of therapy allows them to safely express their feelings about their experiences. Let’s watch.

[Film segment.]

As I’m sure you can imagine, overcoming such horrors requires great courage. We are fortunate that nine such courageous young people – former child soldiers – are with us today. These remarkable young people have traveled from all around the globe to present the reality of their experiences as only they can. They are here to bear witness for the children who are still in captivity and cannot speak for themselves. But they can also provide us with a blueprint for change and a message of hope—by proving that it is possible to rebuild shattered lives.

At this time, I want to introduce each of these brave youngsters and ask them to stand as I call their names.

Fabrice, from Burundi. Radjabu, from Burundi. Eider, from Colombia. Berta, from El Salvador. Steven, from Sierra Leone. Emilia, from Sierra Leone. Mohan, from Sri Lanka. Grace, from Uganda. And Paul, from Uganda.

I also want to thank the parents, guardians, and representatives from government and non-profit organizations who accompanied these children to the conference.

Our young guests are participating in a program with students from schools in the Washington area. I’m delighted that young Americans are getting involved in this issue. Exposure to this information will help them gain new insights about the benefits of liberty, basic human rights and the rule of law.

We can’t give child soldiers their childhood back, but we can help them to rebuild their lives. That is why this conference will examine all of the strategies at the community level.

As Secretary of Labor, I have a particular interest in education and job training programs to help rehabilitate former child soldiers. This is the only way to ensure that these brutalized children will someday have a chance to become productive members of their societies. And I also have a strong interest in developing special protections and facilities for young girls, who have particular vulnerabilities that deserve our attention.

Today, I’m pleased to announce that the U. S. Department of Labor is launching a new $13-million global initiative to help educate, rehabilitate and reintegrate former child soldiers.

This initiative includes a $7-million project funded through the International Labor Organizations’s (ILO) International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC). It will develop comprehensive strategies to help former child soldiers in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Rwanda, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Colombia. This project builds upon and expands a Department of Labor project in the four Central African countries.

The initiative also includes a $3-million project to address the education needs of former child soldiers and children living in northern Uganda, an area that was featured in the video. Just this morning, I signed a Memorandum of Understanding with representatives of the Ugandan Government to launch this program. The Department of Labor looks forward to our future collaboration with the Ugandan Ministry of Gender, Labor and Social Welfare, and the Ministry of Education and Sports.

The third part of the initiative is a $3-million project focusing on the education needs and reintegration of child soldiers in Afghanistan. This project will be implemented by UNICEF, an international organization with a long history of helping children.

Child soldiers suffer in many ways – often in silence.

As one young girl said after witnessing the wanton slaughter of men and women,“So many times I just cried inside my heart because I didn’t dare cry out loud.”

Child soldiers cannot cry out – but we can speak up for them, with clarity, compassion and resolve.That is why we are here today. As part of our commitment, let us also pledge ourselves to address the root causes of child soldiers, which is the absence of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms – a situation all too prevalent in the world today. I look forward to working with you to give these children back their future, and to bring them the hope and opportunity that is every child’s birthright.

Thank you very much.

ANDREW S. NATSIOS, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

Thank you very much. I want to thank my good friend, Secretary Elaine Chao, for her leadership in this issue in the United States Government and worldwide, an issue of great concern, not only to the Department of Labor and to USAID, but to the President and the First Lady themselves. They have had deep, deep concern about the children who have been victimized during the Afghan campaign and in other civil wars around the world where children are frequently recruited into militias that can traumatize them and make it very difficult for them to be reintegrated back into society.

I've been doing this sort of work, in different positions, for the last 14 years. I have interviewed many child soldiers around the world, some 8, 9, 10, or 12 years old, in the middle of civil wars, sometimes with the crackle of gunfire in the background.

I remember that in Mozambique in 1989, I interviewed a nine year-old boy who had just escaped from one of the rebel armies. I attempted to ask him what he had been through and what he had seen - and this is the first time I had interviewed a child of this age who had been a soldier. He was clearly psychologically traumatized.

I do not know the exact experience of this one young boy, but the research that has been done by the international community, by the Labor Department and by USAID indicates, particularly in Mozambique, that the abuses were horrendous.

One of the recruitment techniques that was used for children is they would drag a child out of the village, put the child's parents in their hut, their home, bar them from leaving with guns, and then drag the child up with a torch in the child's hands to torch their home while they watched their parents burn alive, thinking that they had done it. Of course, they were dragged in to doing it. The idea was, if you can kill your parents, even if you're 6 or 7 years old, you can kill anyone.

When they were demobilized out of the movement after the war was over, many of the children could not speak. They were so traumatized, they were incapable of speech. My predecessor, the director of the office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, my good friend, Julia Taft, brought in Dr. Neil Boothby to begin a therapy program in Mozambique for these thousands of children who had killed five or six people, sometimes including their parents and their brothers and sisters. That program treated thousands of children so they could at least go back into society once again in an organized and systematic way.

We know that the legacy of child soldiers, crime, severe depression, high levels of aggression, extreme introversion, memory loss, inability to concentrate, and sleep disorders all are general phenomena across conflicts around the world.

That was 15 years ago. Mozambique has made an extraordinary recovery from that horrible civil war in which a couple million people died, either were killed or starved to death, in one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa. The country has had several democratic elections now, and they are moving along as a model, actually, of democratic development.

We could talk, though, about something happening right now, such as in Uganda with the Lord's Resistance Army, one of the most brutal rebel movements in the world. They have abducted some 14,000 children, some as young as 7 years old. These abductions are brutal, and often accompanied by killings of family members and destructions of their homes. Young girls are given to rebel commanders as wives. Children who try to escape are caught and killed, and other children are forced to do the killing.

Children are forced to beat or trample to death other abducted children. Children who fall behind during the long marches, or resist, are also killed. Many others have been killed in battle or have died from maltreatment, disease, or hunger.

Children are beaten. They are caned. They are forced to beat other children to death, and they themselves sometimes participate in the abductions, which causes severe guilt and trauma among these children.

I could go through a list of the atrocities that have been committed by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, but it is now reaching the worst stage of that civil war. Nongovernmental organizations and the Ugandan Government are reporting some of these terrible events surrounding children who have been abducted into the army itself.

A third example is the Sri Lankan civil war, which appears, we hope, we pray, about to end. We thought the rebel movement and the government were going to reach a peace agreement. They tentatively had, and then the agreement broke down last week. We are hoping that the parties involved will be re-energized, because we are preparing a reconstruction program with other donors to assist the Sri Lankan Government to implement a peace accord.

Sixty thousand people have died in that civil war in the last 20 years. Forty percent of the fighting force of the Tamils is under 18 years old. Another suggests this could be as high as 60 percent. Young Tamil girls are often orphaned, and they have been systematically recruited into the movement since the mid-'80s. Many of these girls are called birds of freedom. They are deliberately chosen as suicide bombers because girl children are not checked as often for security purposes, so they can get through lines and security. The movement has used propaganda to encourage every family to give a child or a daughter to the cause. I could go on about the atrocities that have been committed in that civil war.

What we find in many of these conflicts is common patterns of desensitizing the children wherever the civil war is, anywhere in the world, to violence by forcing them to beat or kill other children of their same age, many of them their friends, or other family members. By doing this, they essentially can do away with any of the constraints on violent behavior.

Many children we interviewed after the Mozambiquean civil war had killed six or seven people. These are 8 or 9 year-old children. And once you've done it that many times, it becomes very easy to do it in the future. So the question comes, what do we do? And after the conflict is over, how do we integrate these children back into society so they can become productive citizens?

Let me first say that we do know a set of things that the international community – my friends who are the development ministers in Europe, in the United Nations, in the International Committee of the Red Cross, in the nongovernmental community and the donor aid agencies, like USAID, which has been a leader in this movement for many years – can do to try to deal with this terrible problem. We do know what works and what does not work. Now let me talk about what is essential.

The first is that if we focus our attention exclusively on child soldiers and ignore the needs of all other children, the other children are quick to notice, and it can actually cause problems in the reintegration of the child soldiers back into society. So we need to deal with all of the children who have been victimized, whether they are child soldiers or whether they simply have been the victims of the war itself.

The second thing we need to deal with is a four-point strategy. We call this DDRR. The first is to demobilize the child soldiers. The second is to document what they went through, where they come from, where their families are to try to reunite them -- that's the third step, reunification. The fourth step is reintegration, where a process is put in place to prescribe the right kind of training or therapy, if that's necessary, to bring the child out of a conflict setting, back into family units, back into their village.

The reality is that most demobilized children who were soldiers do not readily admit they were recruited or dragged into it or forcibly brought into the movement, because many of them feel terrible shame and guilt for the acts they were forced to commit, and we have to sort of go through a process to show them that they did not commit these atrocities of their own free will. They were forced into it, and when a child is forced to kill their parents, it's not because they wanted their parents to die; it's because of the evil people who forced them to do these acts of barbarity.

Usually, demobilization benefits are usually too small and reintegration programs are too short to help the children as much as they should be, given what they've been through. I remember interviewing some children during the terrible civil war in Sierra Leone where one of the rebel movements was actually amputating ears and noses off people, gouging their eyes off, cutting their hands off -- they did this of children and of adults too, simply to terrorize them. When I was in the NGO community for 5 years, I was with World Vision and we had, I remember, a program to try to reintegrate the children who had lost limbs.

These were not -- by the way, these were not accidents during the war. They simply went in and would take out a bunch of kids and simply cut off their hands or their arms or their nose to terrorize the community. So you had to deal with the psychological damage, but in many cases, these children, if they lost a foot, let's say, or an arm, their capacity to get married and their capacity to have a productive trade diminished because of the atrocity that had been committed against them.

So it was very difficult sometimes to get these children reintegrated back into the community. I remember we were -- after the Ethiopian civil war, we ran a reintegration program through USAID, and then I worked on it when I was with World Vision, and we were having trouble getting the villagers to accept their sons back into the village who had been child soldiers in a couple of cases that the government had recruited, because they know they had killed people and they didn't want them back because they thought they were dangerous. So our biggest problem was not the program itself; it was getting their own families and their own villages to accept them because that war had been so brutal and so many people had died in it.

The success of any reintegration effort depends on a significant investment in time and energy and attention to creating a receptive environment before the children are reunited with their families. That's one of the lessons we learned in Ethiopia and Mozambique that we are now applying in Uganda and we will shortly, I hope, in Sri Lanka, which is that we have to prepare the villages and the families through training for the reacceptance of their children, or we can have more serious problems because these kids then get even more alienated from the community.

We also have to make sure that we incorporate traditional leaders and religious leaders and civil leaders and make use of customs and beliefs and ceremonies that confer forgiveness and contrition because there are rituals that all of our societies have -- or most societies have -- for people to put what happened behind them.

I know we ran a program in Rwanda after the horrendous genocide there where a million Tutsis were killed by the government in a terrible slaughter over a 4- or 5-month period. And I interviewed a little boy in one of the camps in Goma, and he was sent by his mother to go get bread from the market, and when he came back, his father and mother's bodies were on the ground bleeding to death, his brothers and sisters had all been killed -- and the only thing that saved him was an elderly lady, whose children themselves had been killed next door, took him and they ran, and that's how he survived. But he was clearly emotionally distraught, and we had to have a therapy program within the refugee camps to try to treat some of the symptoms that we saw there.

Schooling and training, keeping the kids off the streets and giving the training that can allow a kid to support themselves if they're orphaned are critical parts of reintegrating children, particularly child soldiers, but just children generally who are the victims of civil wars.

In World War I, 1914 to 1919, about 10 percent of the casualties in that war were civilians and the rest were military. Every war up until the most recent one, the proportions had switched, which is to say, instead of most of the casualties in the 20th century being of soldiers, they've been of civilians, people who are supposed to be protected under international law. Only in this last war have we seen a reverse -- a beginning to reverse that, and we hope in the 21st century, if we have any more wars, it will be combatants who suffer the burden and not children and other civilians. Maybe there is a trend toward a different way of approaching warfare. We believe that may well be the case.

But the point here is that as long as conflicts, particularly civil wars, take place that last a very long period of time, sometimes 20 years -- the Sudanese civil war which I've worked in now for 14 years has been going on since 1983. I know Dr. Garang, John Garang, the leader of the SPLA, very well in the south. I've met many of the children who were orphaned from it, and there's been an effort by the SPLA to reduce the number of child soldiers and not recruit any more. They've done actually very well at that.

But the longer these wars take -- and when they are civil wars, in particular -- the greater the likelihood there will be child soldiers and that international conventions will not be followed, particularly when there are rebel movements and militias and the governments recruit people by simply dragging them off the streets.

I remember during the civil war in Ethiopia, Mengistu's army was fading away, and what he would do is simply drive down the street with a truck in Addis, and any boy that looked old enough to carry a weapon, they simply dragged into the truck. The parents would never even be told where they were, and if they were killed, they were never given notice of it. They simply were given 2 weeks' training, boots, a gun, and they would be put on the front line. We hope that that sort of warfare is behind us, but who knows.

In the meantime, all of us have to work together in an effective way, based on what we already know works, to try to avoid -- minimize the damage to children in the future, limit the number of children who are recruited, and then develop DDRR programs to take the children out of these militias and reintegrate them effectively back into society. Thank you very much.

OLARA A.OTUNNU, U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict

Distinguished participants: I am delighted to be here today and I should like to thank and congratulate the U.S. Secretary of Labor for hosting this very important conference to heighten the global response to the issue of child soldiers. This conference represents an important opportunity for all of us to work together to stop the use of child soldiers.

I congratulate the U.S. Government for its commitment to the protection of children affected by armed conflict. This has been clearly demonstrated by the U.S. ratification in 1999 of ILO Convention 182 which defines child soldiering as one of the worst forms of child labor and for its recent ratification in December 2002 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict which sets an age limit of 18 years for compulsory recruitment and direct participation in hostilities. I also commend the U.S. State Department for its decision to systematically include a section on child soldiers in its Annual Country Reports on Human Rights – this is a very important development, which once again demonstrates the U.S. Government’s commitment to the protection of children in conflict and post-conflict situations.

I am delighted to see such a distinguished gathering of delegates from the U.S. and other governments, the United Nations, non-governmental organizations, academics and think tanks. I am especially pleased to see the participation of young people in this conference and I should like to personally welcome all the young delegates who are here with us today, and in particular those of you from war-affected countries. Your voices, your experiences and your participation with us today are vital to help us understand and address the phenomenon of child soldiers.

The Impact of Conflict on Children

Today, from the Americas to Africa, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, children are suffering in the midst of armed conflict and its aftermath. This suffering bears many faces: children being killed; children being made orphans; children being maimed; children being uprooted from their homes; children being raped and sexually abused; children being deprived of education and health care; children being exploited as child soldiers; and children being left with deep emotional scars and trauma.

During the 1990s, more than 2 million children have died as a result of armed conflicts; over 1 million have been made orphans; over 6 million have been seriously injured or permanently disabled; and over 10 million have been left with grave psychological trauma. A large number of children, especially young women, have been made the targets of rape and other forms of sexual violence as a deliberate instrument of war. Today, over 20 million children have been displaced by war within and outside their countries and approximately 800 children are killed or maimed by landmines each month.

It is in this context that some 300,000 young persons under the age of 18 are currently being exploited as child soldiers. Girls and boys are fighting as child soldiers with government armed forces and armed opposition groups in more than 30 countries around the world. Most child soldiers are between the ages of 15 and 18, but children as young as seven have been used as soldiers. Some children are used to fight in the frontline, others are used as spies, messengers, servants and sexual slaves. Children make obedient and cheap soldiers capable of the worst atrocities, including against their own families and communities. Children are vulnerable and easy targets. Children are considered to be dispensable; they are recruited as cannon fodder and are used to clear landmines. The manufacture and widespread availability of inexpensive small arms has also contributed to the problem – it has made it much easier to turn young children into soldiers. Even a ten-year-old can strip and reassemble these light and easy-to-use weapons. Adolescent youth are particularly vulnerable to the lures of combat.Those who survive are often physically injured and psychologically scarred, having lost years of schooling and socialization. When a conflict ends, some are shunned, while others are expected to resume their roles as students, siblings, parents, community members and workers.

Progress Achieved

What has been done to reverse this trend? What progress has been made to mitigate the impact of conflict on children? Whilst there are still a lot of challenges ahead, significant progress has been made over the past few years to reverse this trend.

Through its Resolution 1261 (1999), the Security Council has formally affirmed that the protection and well-being of children exposed to armed conflict constitutes a fundamental peace-andsecurity concern, which therefore belongs on its agenda. The progressive engagement of the Council has yielded significant gains for children. These include the four resolutions to date devoted to this issue; an annual review and debate on children and armed conflict; the incorporation of child protection into peacekeeping mandates and training; the inclusion of children and armed conflict concerns in country-specific reports; the creation of the role and deployment of Child Protection Advisers (CPAs) in peacekeeping operations; the inclusion of children’s concerns in peace negotiations and accords; direct participation of children in the deliberations of the Security Council; increasing focus on children in post-conflict programs in situations such as Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan; and commitments for the protection of children in conflict and post-conflict situations in countries such as Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and the Sudan.

In addition, the Security Council recently took a significant stand on the exploitation of children as soldiers. In Resolution 1379 (2001), the Council requested the Secretary-General to provide a list of parties that recruit or use children in situations of conflict on its agenda. This list breaks new ground – for the first time, an official report has specifically named and listed those responsible for brutalizing children in situations of conflict. In requesting this list, the Security Council has sent a strong political message that those who violate children’s rights during conflict cannot do so with impunity and that they will be held accountable for their actions. This is a bold step forward in our global efforts to render unacceptable the exploitation and victimization of children during times of conflict.

Non-governmental organizations and other civil society organizations are also playing a vital role in the protection of children affected by armed conflict including, for example, the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, the Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict, Save the Children, Human Rights Watch and many others.

Several regional and sub-regional organizations, including the Group of Eight, the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe and the African Union have incorporated the children and armed conflict agenda as a priority concern into their policies and programs. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) recently established a Child Protection Unit in the ECOWAS secretariat. The Human Security Network, which is meeting this week in Graz, has decided to devote particular attention to the protection of children in armed conflict.And there has been a significant rise in public and official awareness concerning the impact of conflict on children.

Parallel to these developments, tremendous progress has also been made over the last few years to strengthen and codify international norms and standards for the protection of children during conflict. These include:

• The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which sets an age limit of 18 years for compulsory recruitment and direct participation in hostilities, and requires State parties to raise the minimum age for voluntary recruitment to at least 16;
• The Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, which classifies conscription, enlistment or use in hostilities of children under 15, as well as attacks on schools and hospitals and grave acts of sexual violence, as war crimes;
• International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 182, which classifies child-soldiering as one of the worst forms of child labor and sets 18 as the minimum age for forced or compulsory recruitment;
• The African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child, which prohibits the recruitment or direct participation in hostilities of persons under the age of 18.
• The progress achieved so far is proof that we can chip away at the problem – this trend of abomination can be reversed through serious and concerted measures.

Challenges ahead

We have now reached a critical juncture in the development of the children and armed conflict agenda. With these gains in place, what should be the next steps in the development of this agenda? The most pressing challenge facing us collectively is how to translate the principles, standards and measures that have been put in place into facts on the ground, into a protective regime that can save children in danger. For this, it is imperative to embark on an “era of application.”

We need a major public awareness campaign on the impact of armed conflict on children. We need to reach universal public repudiation of these practices. We must create a political and social climate which makes the abuse and brutalization of children entirely unacceptable.

We need to promote and disseminate the norms and standards which exist to protect children, and to raise awareness about them on the ground. Similarly, we need to support and strengthen traditional values and norms which provide for the protection of children and women in times of war.

We need to put in place strengthened monitoring and reporting mechanisms to identify the violators and take measures against them. Information received through monitoring and reporting must serve as a trigger for action, a trigger for the application of concerted pressure and targeted measures against violators. When information is received about grave violations against children and no action is taken, this betrays the trust of the children.

Dissemination, advocacy, monitoring and reporting are the key components that an “era of application” must encompass. There are other measures which are critical to translating the “era of application” into a meaningful reality. In particular we need to redouble our efforts to ensure:

• that the concerns of children are included in all peace negotiations and peace accords;
• that the rehabilitation of children becomes a central component of any post-conflict programs of rehabilitation and reconstruction, with focus on the key areas of education, basic health care, nutrition, rehabilitation of child combatants and the special needs of girls – investing in children and youth is the best way to ensure long-term peace;
• the full integration of Children Affected by Armed Conflict (CAAC) issues in the mandates, training and activities of peace operations;
• that the deployment of Child Protection Advisers (CPAs) become a general practice in all peace operations;
• the development and strengthening of the capacity of local actors, especially civil society networks, for advocacy, protection and monitoring – this is the best way to ensure local ownership and sustainability;
• that regional organizations develop and strengthen their policies, advocacy and programs on CAAC agenda;
• that all reports to the Security Council on country-specific situations include the protection of children as a specific aspect of the reports;
• that steps be taken to mitigate the impact on children of illicit commercial exploitation of natural resources in conflict zones;
• That governments systematically include violations against children as part of bilateral monitoring mechanisms;
• We need to reach out to and engage young people, from countries affected by conflict as well as countries in peace, as advocates and participants in the movement for child protection.

In addition, we need to take specific and concerted measures to address the exploitation of children as child soldiers. In this connection, I recommend that priority attention be given to the following areas:

• We need to ensure the provision of sustained and adequate resources for the demobilization of child soldiers and their reintegration and rehabilitation into their communities and families, with focus on the key areas of education and vocational training;
• In armed conflicts, girls are often targeted for rape, abduction and forced recruitment. Yet, their needs are often overlooked during Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs. We need to address the special needs of girls through the provision of explicitly tailored strategies and adequate resources to ensure that girls receive necessary assistance;
• It is critical that we address the root causes of children’s recruitment and participation in conflict, including social, economic, cultural and political factors;
• We should work to promote sub-regional, cross-border initiatives to stop the recruitment and abduction of children;
• We need to focus more attention on the link between the proliferation and widespread use of small arms and light weapons and the victimization of children both as casualties and agents in armed conflicts;
• We need to identify best practices and lessons learned on integrating the specific needs of children in demobilization, rehabilitation and reintegration programs;
• We need to consolidate and build upon the ‘list’ established by the Security Council in its Resolution 1379. We need to expand the list and include all situations where children are recruited or used as combatants and we need to ensure that the ‘list’ results in concrete steps for the protection of children. Where substantial progress has not been made, we should consider taking targeted measures against parties; such measures should include the imposition of travel restrictions on leaders and their exclusion from any governance structures and amnesty provisions, a ban on the export or supply of arms, and restriction on the flow of financial resources to the parties concerned;
• And finally, with the establishment of the International Criminal Court, we must work to ensure that individuals responsible for war crimes against children will be among the first to be prosecuted in the new court.

Children represent the hopes and future of every society – destroy them and you have destroyed a society. If we do not address the exploitation of children as soldiers, the cycle of violence will continue. The gains made so far demonstrate that we can reverse this trend. I firmly believe that we all have a role to play in reversing this trend. This conference represents an important opportunity to help reverse this trend. I call upon each and every one of you in your respective capacities to do everything in your power to stop this abomination.

Thank you.

JUAN SOMAVIA, Director-General, International Labor Organization

Thank you Secretary Chao and Deputy Secretary Findlay for your commitment and leadership in organizing this conference.

I want to begin with a personal word to you, to the Bureau of International Labor Affairs staff, and to the entire Department of Labor team about your colleague and our friend,Tom Moorhead. Tom was a committed, compassionate public servant. He was a good friend to me and to the ILO. And he was a decent, caring advocate for children the world over. We will miss Tom dearly. But I know his work lives on through all of you. One need only look around this conference to see his imprint and feel his spirit.

Let me also thank the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Olara Otunnu, for his leadership. And I thank all of the other speakers who have provided such moving testimony to the dimensions of this challenge – and the urgent need to solve it.

In particular, I thank the children for raising their voices. Thank you for sharing your experiences so other children might never know them. Thank you for enlisting in this new fight we wage together for the freedom of young people. Your resilience, your sense of hope, point the way forward for us.

All of our work begins with a vision – a vision of the kinds of societies that we want for our families and our future.

In 1999, the world gave shape to that vision by going on record against abusive child labor. Developed countries and developing countries – employers and workers – joined in the unanimous adoption of Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

The Convention calls on the ILO to play a key role in ending and preventing children’s participation in armed conflict. In addition, our Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work asks us to help Members ratify and implement the relevant Conventions. In four short years, 137 countries have ratified Convention 182.

By adopting this Convention, and endorsing the Declaration, the members of the ILO agreed that poverty is no excuse for tolerating the worst forms of child labor. Ending abusive child labor is part of the social floor below which no society should fall.

Thanks to the strong support of the American people, the ILO is now working in more than 80 countries around the world – tackling every form of abusive child labor – from outright slavery to hazardous work to child domestic labor.

Our mission is clear: parents to work and children to school. This takes partnership and leadership at all levels. And every day, we are together upholding our values and giving new hope to more children and their families.

Perhaps there is no greater challenge or more pressing charge than freeing the 300,000 children who are caught in the crossfire of conflict.

They are on the front lines; servants of strife and victims of brutality; the objects of violence and vengeance learning to kill, to harm and to destroy. What kind of world is it when children see hope in horror, dignity in revenge, comfort in cold blood?

Right now we seem to be living in two worlds. For many, the world we live in is a good world where women and men, and their children have a good life, a decent life. People prosper and if not, the hope of a better future is still alive. Children are nurtured and encouraged at home and in school. Young people can plan for a future of opportunity and choice.

In different ways and at different standards of living, many people around the world are realizing simple human aspirations of having a job, an income, a home, a family, a reasonable standard of living in a reasonably secure environment.

But there is another world of permanent and fundamental insecurity – physical, human, social, political. Hope has dried up, families cannot nurture, communities are under threat, societies are in peril. A culture of fear, violence and destruction flourishes. It is a world of no jobs, no safety nets, no schools, no way out.

The two worlds co-exist within and between countries. They relate to deep imbalances that prevail today. And when armed conflict is one of the destabilizing forces in an insecure world, children are easy prey for those who would exploit them.

In a disintegrating world, children take refuge where they find it – on the streets, in gangs and in armed groups. Girls and boys can be lured by a promise of dignity, care, and a structured life. And of course, many are coerced into serving, removed from their family, their last vestige of security.

I have always believed one key to understanding challenges and finding solutions is by listening. Today I am proud to release two new ILO studies that seek to understand the root causes of this challenge by listening to children themselves. Those in war. Those who have escaped war. Family members. Local and national leaders.

These new reports cover children in conflict in the Philippines and Central Africa. They detail the reasons the growing number of children have been drawn into battle – including the breakdown of law and order, poverty, unemployment, the failure of education, family pressures.

They highlight the changing nature of warfare and sophisticated light arms used by children. They reveal how children are increasingly used in front-line roles. And they demonstrate how girls are especially vulnerable. Subject to sexual abuse, HIV and other infection – as are boys – they may also end up pregnant and alone.

And their ordeal does not end when they get away. These children commonly face rejection if they return to their homes and communities.

These reports confirm the importance of comprehensive solutions, integrated approaches. They underscore the need for building broad partnerships nationally and internationally for an effective response.

Our studies and years of field experience help guide the way. As we move forward, I believe we need a three-front global battle plan to prevent and end the use of children in armed conflict.

First, enforcement. Conventions and laws are not enough. They have to be known, understood and respected. There are plenty of tough laws on the books, but there is an enforcement gap. The goal is not simply having a law, it is living by it. Awareness raising is key. We are working in nations like Burundi and Rwanda to help governments translate legislation against the use of child soldiers into policies and practice.

Second, it takes practical, targeted strategies to help children overcome their trauma and prepare for a better future. This means counseling. Quality education. Vocational training. Assistance to parents to boost incomes and get decent jobs. We are working in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sri Lanka on reintegrating child soldiers back into peacetime life.

Third, it takes a development strategy to get at the root causes. People are poor. Development is stagnant. Societies are in chaos. We need to connect work and the dignity of work with growth and well-being of families. This includes promoting social and economic reconstruction – poverty eradication, employment and education policies. Essentially, we are talking of building or rebuilding communities and societies.

Our work on the ground is testimony to the key role which the ILO’s decent work agenda must play in this process – it covers the work that children should not be doing, preparing young people to find work, promoting opportunities for parents to have work, and securing dignity for all.

In a larger sense, our work is about making our communities more stable and our world more secure. It is about building a place for all of our children to find peace. This is our vision.

We can make it real. Instead of weapons and war, let us arm our children with opportunity and hope. No girl or boy should have to surrender their childhood to war. Together, let’s win it back.

BRUCE WILKINSON, Senior Vice President of International Programs,World Vision

Thank you. I am the Senior Vice President of World Vision’s international programs group, and we want to welcome you all this afternoon. We are very pleased that the Department of Labor is sponsoring this event and that World Vision is the sponsor of the luncheon this afternoon. We greatly appreciate the Secretary's interest and commitment to children around the world, especially children that are facing armed conflict situations. So thank you very much for coming, and thanks to the Department of Labor for putting on this event.

Through World Vision's work overseas in over a hundred countries, we come in contact with children in very difficult situations, especially children that are facing armed conflict situations.

Personally, I lived 17 years in West Africa, and during those 17 years, I experienced child soldiers in very real ways. I have had experience in Sierra Leone where we were working in the Kenema and Bo area, which is the diamond-mining area of Sierra Leone. On one occasion, we were on a small convoy heading up from the capital city of Freetown, heading into Kenema and Bo. On this road, we were stopped at frequent intervals by children. These were child soldiers, actually. They were inspecting our vehicles. They were children probably the age of my son, who is 13 years old.

As they inspected our vehicle, they were waving around their AK-47's. I would venture to say that they had been either drinking or had some other influence in their system. These are times when you start to see the eyes of a child carrying a weapon, feeling powerful and seeing themselves in a different light than they ever have seen themselves previously in their own lives. It was really a time when I got to know that these children didn't have a chance to live out their childhood. They didn't have a chance to actually be socialized in a normal way that children would be socialized, and it was very disturbing to see that.

I was also at one time in the eastern part of Congo, and got caught in the crossfire between child soldiers who were arguing over a certain piece of an asset.There were a couple of vehicles they were arguing over, and a firefight broke out. We were in the middle of this firefight among children, firing bullets past us,and these children looked like children who should be in school. Here are children who should be playing football, and yet, they are out arguing over assets and fighting for their own survival, which is very precarious.

In northern Uganda, for example,World Vision has been working with child soldiers, demobilizing them and actually helping them in a trauma center. About 5,000 children have gone through that center in northern Uganda. There has been great progress – seeing these children get normalized and back in their regular communities; finding ways in which the community can accept these children back into their own homes, their own societies; and making sure these children get reintegrated.

World Vision also is working in Colombia. In Colombia, we have watched and been part of a children's movement for peace. There are about a million children that are joining this peace movement and basically saying that, look, we can have a peaceful society.

There is a young lady named Maria Sanchez who at the age of 14 began this peace movement. In fact, at the age of 17, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She did not receive the Peace Prize, but she was nominated, which was an incredible recognition for her as a child, mobilizing almost over a million children in a peace movement in Colombia. These are beautiful manifestations of children taking action and being active in terms of what they see are their issues and then children as participants, and children actually seeing themselves as part of the solution.

We are very pleased to be part of a movement that focuses on these children because they are overlooked. Research suggests that there are anestimated 300,000 children active in armed conflict in the world. I think those estimates are conservative, and we know that these children need our help.

I would like to take a second to talk about the prevention side, what is happening in the realm of HIV and AIDS.

There are about 14 million children presently orphaned in this world because of HIV and AIDS. Fourteen million children who are not going to be socialized in their homes, in their families, children that are going to be fending for their own interests.

You are seeing child-headed households in many of the African countries already, children of 13, 14, 15 years old taking care of their brothers and sisters. I have visited many of these child-headed households.

When you go into one of these child-headed households, you begin to see the real fear in these children. “Here I am, 13, 14 years old, trying to take care of my 5-year-old sister who perhaps is ill or helping my little brother find his way to school, finding the school fees, making sure he has a uniform to be able to go to school.”

This whole area of HIV and AIDS, as it overlaps with preventing the use of child soldiers, is something that we as a community really need to take seriously. It is not just in Africa. It is happening in other parts of the world, as well. These children are in desperate need of attention and care, so that they can be socialized into a society and make a contribution within that society.

If we miss this opportunity, we are going to be finding that a lot more of these children are going to be tempted to move into areas that we have been looking at during this conference, in terms of taking up arms, and being mobilized by certain forces within their countries, whether there are rebel factions or others. These children will be moving ahead in the world that will create more destruction and destabilization. That will, in turn, prevent the children in those countries from having a normal childhood.

I want to implore us today. We need to look at the HIV/AIDS crisis, the 14 million children that are at risk, of not being able to be socialized and becoming active contributing citizens to their countries. I would hope that we get a chance to discuss this issue during this event.

I have the privilege now of introducing Arnold Levine, who is the Deputy Under Secretary for International Affairs.

Mr. Levine has a distinguished record, both as a Federal civil servant and as a transportation and trade consultant during his 22-year career at the U.S. Department of Transportation. Mr. Levine earned a reputation as one of the agency's most experienced, knowledgeable, and successful policy-makers. In 1996, Mr. Levine left the Department to join GKMG Consulting Services, which is part of PA Consulting Group, and helped build that company into a respected transportation practice.

In both his public- and private-sector careers, he has been recognized for his breadth and depth of knowledge of transportation policy, economics, and finance, and especially for his management skills, and as I have had the brief opportunity to know Mr. Levine, his integrity.

Mr. Levine hails from Pittsburgh. He is a native of Pittsburgh, has spent a long time as a resident of the historic city of Fredericksburg. He earned his first degree from Carnegie Mellon, his M.A. in Russian History from the University of Pittsburgh. He has served in the United States Forces, an Army Reservist. I would like to welcome Mr. Levine.

ARNOLD LEVINE, Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor

Thank you to World Vision for sponsoring today's working lunch and for the organization’s terrific ongoing work on behalf of children around the world.

I would like now to introduce our keynote speaker, an advocate for children around the world and a leading voice for this administration on international affairs, the United States Alternate Representative to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs,Ambassador Richard S.Williamson.

Ambassador Williamson has a long and excellent career in service in various positions in the U.S. Government. He has served as U.S.Ambassador to the United Nations office in Vienna as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations and as a member of the President's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control.

He also served as a member of President Ronald Reagan's senior White House staff in the position of Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs.

So, without further ado, please join me in giving a warm welcome to the United States Alternate Representative to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs,Ambassador Richard Williamson.

AMBASSADOR WILLIAMSON, U.S. Alternate Representative to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs

Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be with you this afternoon. I would like to begin by thanking Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and her Department of Labor for hosting this conference, along with World Vision for sponsoring our luncheon today.

Let me also just note, in my position there are a number of nongovernmental organizations that play a vital role. One of them is World Vision on this issue and others. One of Bruce Wilkinson's predecessor's,Andrew Natsios who was here earlier, is a tremendously important leader of the Bush Administration who, as I said, spent time with World Vision and has given them a particularly deep and committed appreciation of the problem not only of child soldiers, but the human rights tragedies and humanitarian suffering in Sudan, Eastern Congo, Burundi, and elsewhere.

Also, I would like to note my appreciation at seeing an old friend, Martha Newton, who is Chief of Staff at the International Bureau at the Department of Labor.

The topic we are here to address requires as much courage, faith, and determination as any issue facing the world community today. That being the case, I am particularly gratified that we are joined by representatives from several governments who are prepared to address this issue in their own countries, El Salvador, the Philippines, Colombia, Burundi, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.

I am particularly heartened that the Government of Burundi has agreed to be an active participant in this event.

As you know, Burundi was one of the five countries named in the United Nations Secretary-General's report on children in armed conflict. To face up to this fact is to take the first difficult step towards progress. Shame lies in inaction. Shame lies in indifference, but there is no shame whatsoever in facing a crisis openly and welcoming assistance and support from others.

The very fact that we must gather to discuss child soldiers trapped in the toils of war in the early days of the 21st century should shock the conscience of the world. Our children are our future. Allowing their exploitation in armed conflicts does irrevocable harm to them and it diminishes the future for all, robbing a people of the future leaders they need to reconstruct their society when the conflict ends, scarring the next generation that a society needs to reconcile and find justice when the killing stops, and often irreparably harming the child's opportunity for a healthy, productive, normal life.

Therefore, we have a special responsibility to make extra efforts to protect the children caught in this destructive cauldron of armed conflicts.

Comb through President Bush's speeches and public statements, and you will find a recurrent sharply worded theme. It is our duty to make sure that no child is left behind.

The President emphasizes that word "duty," as he should. There is no better platform upon which to build a just world than the obligations of adults to serve their children and serve them well.

So, to stand here today and acknowledge that over 300,000 children are currently being used in armed conflict as soldiers, messengers, guards, runners, bearers, spies, cooks, and sex slaves is almost to speak the unspeakable. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, but we know it exists in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. Children as young as 10 years old have been abducted from their homes and forced into situations where they witness and sometimes perpetrate violence against their own families and communities. Once these children have escaped the toils of war or have been discarded because they have been so badly wounded physically and mentally that they can no longer function as tools of tyrants, their situation hardly improves. Lacking education, guidance, and a sense of how an orderly world operates, they have few opportunities for hope.

The number of children trafficked or exploited for sexual purposes has grown dramatically. In recent years, political conflict, poverty, transitional criminal rings, and this cynical exploitation of the power of the Internet all play a part in the sordid destruction of human dignity.

In the Mono River region of West Africa, the use of child soldiers perpetuates violence across borders. For many children, the only life known is one of violence and bloodshed. As rebels and mercenaries prowl for new recruits, child soldiers who cannot reintegrate into society have hampered efforts for peace in Sierra Leone, which cannot escape the instability in neighboring Liberia.

Ongoing conflict in western Côte d'Ivoire has wreaked havoc on the younger generation, and pulled them into a fight they did not start. As the New York Times reported just this past Monday,“ever-growing numbers of youth from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast are now schooled in nothing but the art of destruction."

The international community has taken some important steps in responding to these abuses, steps the United States has strongly supported. The first Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict to the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on May 25, 2000, and came into force on February 12, 2002. Over 111 countries have signed, and over 52, including the United States, have ratified it. Inter alia, the first optional protocol confirms that the minimum age is 18 years for compulsory recruitment into the armed forces of a state party or other armed groups.

In addition, state parties must take all feasible measures to ensure that members of their armed forces who are under 18 years old do not take a direct part in hostilities, and that armed groups do not recruit or deploy in hostilities persons under 18.

The second Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child also ratified by the United States addresses the sale of children, child pornography, and child prostitution. It is the first instrument of international law to define these terms legally, and it is essential to our efforts to combat trafficking for forced commercial sexual exploitation.

The protocol requires state parties to protect children up to the age of 18 by treating the actions of exploitation as a criminal act that merits serious punishment.

In the global arena, the optional protocol promotes international law enforcement cooperation. These two protocols are important commitments and emblems of an emerging international consensus. The United States also supports the working group on child protection training for peace personnel, and the principle that child protection should be an explicit feature of all peace-keeping mandates.

The United States has welcomed the report of the Secretary- General on Children in Armed Conflict published in November 2002 that I mentioned earlier.

As mandated by the Security Council Resolution 1379 of 2001, this report includes an annex that lists parties to armed conflict that recruit or use children in violation of relevant international obligations.

As a consequence, the report cites 23 parties, including governments and/or rebel groups in Afghanistan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Somalia that recruit and use child soldiers in violation of international obligations applicable to them.

This list has focused world attention on situations that need immediate attention, and it sends a clear political signal to the implicated states of their need to comply with the international obligations.

Such public exposure could be a powerful tool. By exposing violators, it helps hold them to account and hopefully it helps better protect children exposed to armed conflict.

To keep up the pressure, Security Council Resolution 1460 calls for the submission of a follow-on report in 2003 on the status of children in armed conflict in the states listed in the 2002 report. The United States would also like to see the Secretary-General go further than this and submit a list of the worst abusers of children in armed conflict not limited to the countries currently on the Security Council agenda.

Some of the worst violators of children in armed conflict do not appear on the list, countries such as Burma, Uganda, and Colombia, even though they are mentioned in the report.

The United States also would like to see active monitoring of those who have already been named. In this case, more is better, much better.

The obnoxious use of children in armed conflict cannot stand the light of scrutiny. The perpetuators of the abuse of children in armed conflict want to remain in the shadows, hidden from scrutiny, protected from accountability. We need to know, the world needs to know what is happening to our children.

I am pleased to report that significant positive progress has been made in Afghanistan since the inception of the Bonn process just over one year ago. As the Secretary-General report notes, the Afghan national army will not recruit underaged soldiers. Despite the use of child soldiers by factions, the lives of Afghan children have improved markedly.

Since October 2001,America's fund for Afghan children has raised $11.5 million, including more than $1 million in the past few months. Further, the United States Government has donated more than $185 million since September 2001 to assist in general resettlement efforts in Afghanistan, especially efforts affecting refugees and internally displaced children.

Although Burundi has not received the same attention as Afghanistan, the situation there is extremely volatile, and the international community must be vigilant in preventing a catastrophe on the scale witnessed by Burundi's neighbor in the recent past. There have been encouraging developments, but circumstances in Burundi are still such that children continue to be exploited as combatants. The United States’ support for the Burundian transition government is consistent with our calls to prohibit the use of children in armed conflict.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we have witnessed the sad exploitation of children in war over the past few years. Human Rights Watch reports that the government has called on children between 12 and 20 years old to enlist.

Meanwhile, rebel groups have habitually recruited children to aid their causes. Hereto, in progress toward a transitional government,we are working with the Security Council to eliminate the use of child soldiers, but the recent increased violence in the Eastern Congo is the cause of intense concern.

The government of Liberia's flagrant failure to adhere to international law is a major contributing factor to the ongoing instability in West Africa. The armed forces of Charles Taylor, the President of Liberia, and the militia he has backed have a record of recruiting underage children.

As long as Taylor's government continues to support civil strife in West Africa, the threat to the region's children is real, the damage is great. Reform of the Liberian government electoral and judicial systems with respect to human rights continues to be a principal goal of United States policy in Western Africa.

Sadly, the situation is just as grave in Somalia. Reports have indicated that boys as young as 14 and 15 years old have participated in militia attacks, while faction leaders recruit young boys to serve as personal bodyguards. If the international community does not make extra efforts to protect these children, the situation could and probably will get worse.

Some recent estimates suggest that there are at least 175,000 internally displaced children in Somalia. In light of these ongoing tragedies, we recognize the contributions and dogged efforts of the United Nations' Secretary-General, the Security Council, the Secretary-General Special Representative on Children in Armed Conflict, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the important work of non-governmental organizations such as World Vision.

Working with governments and armed groups in the field, they have demobilized children and provided them with access to education, social services, and alternative employment to facilitate their reintegration into society, but the magnitude of the problem that confronts these children is such that the United States cannot act alone. Responsible governments must use the United Nations as a tool to eliminate children in armed conflict and must supplement that effort as elsewhere. Therefore, the United States supports programs to assist in the rehabilitation of child soldiers through grants and cooperative agreements, including the Displaced Children and Orphans Fund and the Patrick J. Leahy War of Victims Fund.

The Displaced Children and Orphans Fund focuses on developing and supporting programs that relate to children affected by war. It also supports children orphaned by AIDS, street children, and children with disabilities.

Since 1989, the Displaced Children and Orphans Fund has contributed more than $74 million to programs in 28 countries. Administered by USAID and carried out by nongovernmental organizations, the fund has programs in Angola, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Croatia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Kosovo, Liberia, Mali, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda,Vietnam, and Zambia.

Also in place since 1989, the Patrick J. Leahy War Victims Fund works in war-effected countries to provide a dedicated source of financial and technical assistance for civilian victims of war. The Leahy War Victims Fund supports programs that provide prosthetic services and programs that follow up such services with patient monitoring. The fund has provided over $60 million in more than 16 countries.

Exploited and scarred by war or the sex trade, hundreds of thousands of children around the world virtually define the word "victim." They have been maimed, and through them, we are all being maimed, the spoil of our future, and subject to the worst kind of cynical brutality.

In Washington, in the United Nations and national capitals around the globe, and in gatherings like this one of public officials and private citizens, the time has come to turn back the flood tide of barbarity.

We the civilized world face many tests, terrorism, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the scourge of drugs, to name only a few, but no test is more threatening to our moral integrity than the enslavement and exploitation of children.

How can we create a better world if we do not first insist on keeping our children safe? The answer to this question is obvious. The term child soldier must be banished from the vocabulary of mankind. We can no longer permit or tolerate the reality to which it refers.

Once again, let me say how much I appreciate your dedicated efforts. Thank you.

ARNOLD L. LEVINE Deputy Under Secretary for International Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor

Closing Remarks

Over the course of the past day and a half, we have all been moved by the heart-wrenching stories of child soldiers. We have had the benefit of hearing from experts around the globe who have shared their firsthand knowledge about the best ways to confront this heinous practice, but for me and I am sure for many of you, the most compelling of all the testimonies were those of our young guests, former child soldiers who brought home the magnitude of this tragedy.

At this time, I would like to take just a moment to recognize each of these brave young people and ask them to stand for us one last time.

Fabrice from Burundi. Radjabu from Burundi. Eider from Colombia. Berta from El Salvador. Steven from Sierra Leone. Emilia from Sierra Leone. Mohan from Sri Lanka. Paul from Uganda. And Grace from Uganda.

I would also take a moment to make a special note of recognition from the brave young girl from the Philippines, Jelyn, who could not make it with us today, unfortunately. Thank you all.

These brave young people showed us that the lives of children scarred by war can be turned around and positive change can occur, and we can help renew the lives of thousands of children forced to act against their natures for the benefit of those without morals and without mercy.

From the engaging keynote addresses and panel discussions we have heard over the last day and a half, there are many valuable lessons that we can take away. I am not going to try to summarize all of them, but we have a short list that I would like to cover for you.

That a holistic approach to combating the problem of child soldiers, one that incorporates strategies of demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration offers children the greatest chance to rebuild their lives.

That demobilization and assistance for children should not be conditioned to a peace process or broader demobilization. We should not ask children removed from war to wait and endure more suffering. We should act with urgency on their behalf.

That the collection and dissemination of information is a crucial instrument in preventing the use of child soldiers and in developing effective strategies to address the problem, as evidenced by the Wounded Childhood report recently released by the International Labor Organization.

That girls who were child soldiers have very special needs, as do boys, and these must be taken into consideration in the process of rehabilitation and reintegration.

That there is inherent value in a child-centered approach, a full respect for their dignity.

That children can be important agents of change themselves and renewal in their own lives.

That we should develop community-based systems of child protection and make families and communities central to the process of healing.

That children in armed conflict need to be understood as being the victims and not the perpetrators of crimes.

That for children to become productive citizens, they need the full and unmitigated acceptance and support of their communities and families.

That we must confront issues such as poverty and the growing crisis of HIV/AIDS orphans if we are to avoid conflicts that employ children as weapons of war.

That the political will must exist to enforce international standards and national laws that prohibit the use of child soldiers.

That prevention should be our ultimate goal, so that not even one child is harmed or exploited as a result of being caught in the crossfire.

I would like to express my appreciation to all of our speakers and panelists today and yesterday and to our colleagues at the Department of State and the U.S.Agency for International Development for their support and valuable contributions, and to Bruce Wilkinson and World Vision for sponsoring today's lunch.

My particular thanks go to USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios,Ambassador Williamson, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia, and UN Special Representative Olara Otunnu, for taking time out of their busy schedules to attend this conference.

I want to give, again, special thanks to the courageous young people, the former child soldiers, who shared so much of themselves with us. By speaking out on this issue, they have contributed in a very real way to the campaign to end this terrible crime against the world's children.

Their voices, their words, and their songs amplified by the work of this conference will become a powerful force against those who seek to exploit children in this most brutal and immoral manner.

I would also like to thank their parents, guardians, and government and NGO officials who accompanied them here today.

As many of you know, and they have been quite vocal over the course of the past couple of days, there is another group of young people from Washington area's John F. Kennedy High School who participated in a parallel program alongside this conference, and I want to thank you and commend you for your interest and for the most part for your exemplary behavior.

And let's not forget there are parents and teachers and school administrators who have organized this wonderful program.

Importantly, I want to thank my own new staff. If it hasn't been painfully aware to you already, I started in my job on Monday at the Department of Labor, coming out of one week of retirement into this very noble and honorable position, and I want to thank the staff at the Department of Labor for their dedication and professionalism in making this conference a reality. They have done a terrific job, and I think we should recognize them all.

I basically got a free ride this week, having to do nothing more than make a few introductions and read a few remarks. The real work, as anybody who has tried to organize a conference knows, is done by the career staff and others who worked so hard to make it a reality.

I also want to recognize, of course,Tom Moorhead, the former Deputy Under Secretary of International Labor Affairs at the Department of Labor, who was totally committed to the global campaign to end the worst forms of child labor. His leadership will be sorely missed.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you for your interest and attendance at this important conference. I have been involved in many conferences over my career, and they are all plagued to one extent or another by flagging interest and by what we will call participant leakage over the course of the program. I think our record here over the last day and a half has been terrific. I am delighted that you have all stuck with us and you have been so active and vocal in your participation.

The time has come for the community of civilized nations to come together and say, once and for all, no more child soldiers. As Secretary Chao said at the beginning of this conference, we cannot give child soldiers back their childhood. That is a fact, but we can help them rebuild their lives. Working together, we can, we must, and we will make a difference for the world's children.

Thank you very much for participating.

CONVERSATIONS WITH FORMER CHILD SOLDIERS

YOUTH ROUNDTABLE WITH SECRETARY CHAO

ELAINE L. CHAO
U.S. Secretary of Labor

JANE LOWICKI
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children

BERTA
International Youth Delegate, El Salvador

STEVEN
International Youth Delegate, Sierra Leone

EMILIA
International Youth Delegate, Sierra Leone

MS. LOWICKI:

Good morning, everyone. I’m Jane Lowicki with the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. We have a very special moment now together.

We’ve heard the words “child soldiers.” Who are the real people that we’re labeling as child soldiers? What does that label mean? What are the assumptions each one of us has about those young people? Each of us has our own different experience. Some of us come from countries where they’re from, but most of us in this room do not.

We have an opportunity now, this morning, with these wonderful young people, to hear more. We’ve heard some of the facts: there are 300,000 child soldiers, conservatively, in the world; that they are boys and girls; that they come from different countries. But the truth is, there is so much more diversity and complexity to their lives and to that scenario.

What was their life like before they became a child soldier? Why did they become a child soldier? How did it happen? Did they choose, for some reason, to enter a fighting force? Were they forced? Are our assumptions that everyone was forced? What was it like in that force? Was it a constant state of victimization or were there other things happening? Were they making decisions and choices throughout that process? How did they get out? How did they leave? What was life like afterwards, when they tried to go home or when they tried to go somewhere else? Then, immediately or years down the line, what are their lives like now? What do they think about their experiences?

So many of these questions we each have our individual answer to, and our experts this morning are representatives of the young people that you met earlier today. They represent, however, thousands more. So they’re speaking on their own behalf, but they’re also speaking from the experiences of all these young people.

Directly to my right we have Steven from Sierra Leone, and we have Emilia, also from Sierra Leone further to the right. In the corner, we have Berta from El Salvador. We’re also honored to have Secretary Chao among us, who is also going to ask some questions as we go along.

Now, I’ve told them all that, as diverse as child soldiers’ issues are around the world, that the audience is equally diverse, and I want to have a quick show of hands as to how many of you have ever met someone who had been part of a fighting force when they were a child. Can you raise your hands?

Okay. Well, that’s a good number, but it’s a lot of people in the front row, too, so we really have a mixed group. They know that for many of you, if not most, this is the first time you’re hearing something from them directly. So in getting to know them, we hope you feel free, as the conference goes on, to speak to them directly.

We have a very informal format today where we’re really going to have some one-on-one conversation, and I’m going to move even closer as I talk to them. I want you to feel also like you’re the next chair in this circle, as much as you can. And as much as you can, think about the places that they’re talking about, thinking about being there yourselves.

As I mentioned to you earlier, Steven, Emilia and Berta, we’re going to start by talking a little bit about your specific countries and some of the experiences young people have there and how they get involved in fighting forces, and I’ll ask you that individually and hear more about that, but then we’ll have some more open discussion, and the Secretary will also jump in with more questions.

So I’m going to start directly to my right with you, Steven, and ask you to tell me where you’re from.

STEVEN: Okay. Before I start, I would like to greet everybody and I would like to thank the Secretary, Mrs. Chao, for giving us the opportunity to be here. My name is Steven Swankay. I’m from Sierra Leone. I’m here to participate in this conference. I was a former child soldier, but now I’m no longer.

MS. LOWICKI: What town were you from in Sierra Leone?

STEVEN: I’m from the eastern province of Sierra Leone.

MS. LOWICKI: Okay. Great.

Emilia, how about you? Where are you from in Sierra Leone?

EMILIA: I’m from the southern part of Sierra Leone, Liange. We are into mining.

MS. LOWICKI: What type of mining?

EMILIA: Bauxite.

MS. LOWICKI: Sierra Leone is rich with natural resources, so she’s from one of the areas where bauxite is. And Kono, you may know, where Steven is from, is where many of the diamond resources come from.What about you, Berta? Where are you from in El Salvador?

[All comments by Berta are through interpreter.]

BERTA: I was born in Santiago.

MS. LOWICKI: And where are you living now?

BERTA: I now live in the capital, San Salvador.

MS. LOWICKI: I think I’ll start with you, coming back. Can you say a little bit about the conflict in El Salvador in the ‘80s and something about young people’s involvement, including your own, in the conflict.

BERTA: I will start with the general ideas of how armed conflict came about in my country.

At the end of the ‘70s decade, we had differences in classes, as well as discrimination. So many people decided to organize and fight to build a better society and a better democracy. And that is how armed conflict began at the end of the ‘70s. Conflict continued until the peace treaties were signed January 16th of 1992.

MS. LOWICKI: And how old were you back then, back in the ‘80s, at the time when the conflict was beginning?

BERTA: I was born in 1976. In the ‘80s, many children were forced to join, and others decided themselves that they were going to start fighting, maybe because they had seen their parents shot and killed by the military, such was the massacre of El Mozote and many other massacres that occurred in my country.

MS. LOWICKI: So what was daily life like at that time? Did you have enough food? Were you able to go to school?

BERTA: I was born and raised in a coffee-growing area in the Department of Usulutan. In that time, all of us, from the moment that we were 5 years old on, would help our parents working with the coffee.

At that time, we worked for low wages, gathering coffee. They would pay us 14 colones for a sack. And the guerillas were surrounding the areas where we used to work, and they would force the owners to raise our salaries, saying that we weren’t getting paid enough. At the same time, they were letting us know that they were fighting a war for us, that they were trying to help the working class, and they wanted us to join them in this fight.

MS. LOWICKI: So what were the specific pressures, in your case, that had you enter the fighting force at that time?

BERTA: Well, at that time, they started asking us to cooperate, basically forcing us to cooperate. They would use the children to make us go to the store to get stuff for them. Also, they would use us to take the food that our parents had been forced to cook for them. In 1990, I decided to join, to help build a true democracy. I wanted life to be different in my country. I wanted life to be different for my children. So in the ‘90s I joined, and I was there for one year, until September of 1991, when I was shot in the back and ended up in a wheelchair.

MS. LOWICKI: When you made that initial choice, were you doing that also with other young people or was it very much an individual choice for you?

BERTA: It was something I decided. Although the guerilla that surrounded us had lots of kids I knew in it, there were also children from different departments that had come. I was part of the special forces, as were many children. They used us to be the special forces. The special forces were in charge of protecting the base. The base is where all the commanders were. Then, when the military would come and try to fight the commanders, we were the ones fighting in order to protect the base.

However, during that time, I was the radar operator, which means I communicated with other squadrons of our group so that we wouldn’t shoot ourselves. I never really shot.

MS. LOWICKI: Berta, thank you. I’m going to come back to you and ask you some more detail about that experience, but first we’re going to talk to Emilia and Steven, and then we’ll talk more in detail about those experiences, and the Secretary also at that time, too, can throw in some more questions as well.

Who wants to go first? Emilia, how about you? Do you want to say something about Sierra Leone and the conflict there?

EMILIA: Let Steven go.

MS. LOWICKI: Okay. Steven, you start first, then.

STEVEN: Before the war in Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone was one of the most peaceful countries, but in 1991, the war started in Liberia. Later, the war entered into Sierra Leone. When the war entered into Sierra Leone, it started from the eastern part, which is where I’m from.

So I was there living with my parents in one of the communities. We had fighting nearby, so we decided to leave the place and go to one of our villages. When we went there, I was with my parents, staying there with them. We heard that the town had been captured by the rebels.

So after that, we left the village, we went to another village. So after some time, the rebels were again close to the village that we were from. After two or three days, we heard that the rebels were now in the village, they had come to collect food because in those times if there was a shortage of food, you found some place to get food. So they went to our village.

MS. LOWICKI: Hang on one second. So the war started in the east. I want to make sure the audience is following along. And because they were coming, you fled your village with your family. And then you heard that they had taken over your village — they were looting for food. What happened next?

STEVEN: We went to the bushland.When they came to the village, they didn’t meet anybody, so they too decided to go into

My mom said that we didn’t have anything. We were staying in the bush, we didn’t have anything. And they said that, if you don’t produce anything, we are going to kill you.

My mother refused to do anything that they ordered. So I was there with them for, let me say for 30 minutes, and they said, we have to move because you don’t have anything. But before they left us, they are going to take me along with them. So they took me to the town that I’m from, which is Koidu town. I was there for, let me say one month, and then they took me to Kundiu, one of our big towns in the Kono district.

MS. LOWICKI: When you were going, what were the rebels who took you like? Were they young people like yourself?

STEVEN: No, they were not young people like myself. They were all 18 years old.

MS. LOWICKI: And when they took you, were they taking many other children at the same time?

STEVEN: On my way, I met three of my friends. They, too, had been captured.

MS. LOWICKI: And how old were all of you at that time?

STEVEN: By then, I was 9 years old. And my friends that they had captured, I cannot tell their age.

MS. LOWICKI: What were you thinking at that time? Obviously you were running and afraid. But what did it feel like when they first got you and they were taking you there?

STEVEN: When I was captured, because we knew that these are people that had come to kill us, I thought that they were going to kill me.

MS. LOWICKI: So then you ended up in Koidu – was it Koidu they took you to ultimately?

STEVEN: Actually, Koidu was my town.They said that we should not stay there because if we stayed there, we would have the chance to escape from them. So they had to take us to a place that we’ve never been to.

MS. LOWICKI: Stop there for now, and I’ll come back and we’ll talk more about the experience after that.

But, Emilia, I know in the last — I don’t know how many days, you’ve been asked the same questions the whole time about your experience and your life, and I know that’s exhausting. So can you tell us something about the girls in your community, other friends of yours, kids, what they experienced in the area you came from when the rebels came.

EMILIA: I was 9 years old when I was captured. The rebels attacked my village where we are staying in 1994 when I was 9 years old. They shot my brother on the spot, and they asked me, with six people, to go and bury him. But we couldn’t bury him, and we were brought back to town.

Because they hadn’t got a hold of everybody in the town, we tried to run up and find a place to hide ourselves. We got into the bush. We were there for about six months, but we couldn’t stay without food. People were dying of hunger. There was no support there. There was nothing for us to live on. By then, my mom was sick. We broke sticks and leaves, and laid on them in a space at night. She couldn’t bear this kind of hardship. She got sick.

So me and some other people, we were asked to go out to find food. We thought we could find bush food to sustain ourselves. On our way, we met these rebels. They asked us where we were about to go, and we told them that we were going to look for food. They said, oh, ourselves, we are looking for food, and you are going to join us. We didn’t want to go, but they forced us. They asked us to decide on one thing, either they kill us or we go together.

I did not answer because I was afraid, because they looked so fearful, the way they dressed and everything they did. So they took us along with them. We were treated like slaves. They beat us like any other animal. In fact, some were killed. So they did anything to us that we didn’t like. They forced us to do their own wishes.

I was lucky to meet with one woman who was the commander’s wife. I cried to her. I said, they have killed my dad, they have killed my brother and my mother is sick. I don’t know whether she has been killed. I don’t know. I said, so please, ma’am, I take you to be my mother. Help me so that these people will not get onto me. Because sometimes you wouldn’t do anything, they would look at you and say, you are going to be killed, and they would kill you. So it was not easy with us.

So I was with that lady, doing domestic work, traveling for quite some long distance.We used to carry loads for them. Sometimes we walked and walked and got tired. Sometimes our feet got swelled up because of walking on the route. We couldn’t sleep in bush, so this hardship was all over, so we got fed up with it.

At one time, the elders of the commanders were saying that we were heading to the capital city of Sierra Leone, which is Freetown. In 1997, they said we are going to attack the government and overthrow the government.

So some of us, we were not happy because we thought it was dangerous because there were also government troops, but they forced us also to go there. We went with them. They allowed us in the town to scatter all about to do propaganda for them, to be spies for them, to find out where the enemy’s location was at. That was the work we were doing in Freetown when we got there.

I used to walk by myself, although we usually walked in groups of people when we came to town. But I happened to find a family friend. I met her and I was happy because I was fed up of living with these kinds of people. So I met with her and cried to her. I said, please, as you are seeing me now, I don’t want to go back to the bush. I showed her my body, some marks on my body. I explained the details of my experience to her. I said, please help me because you are a family friend. You all know what happens to us.

She accommodated me and she kept me quiet until the government troops and the other rebels left the city.

MS. LOWICKI: So there were government troops, the rebels, and yet another force at that time.

EMILIA: Yes. So after they were chased out of the city, I was there with this woman. I kept hiding, hiding, hiding because I was a target, and so was whosoever was in that kind of situation with me. That is, if you were captured by the government troops at that time, you would be killed. And if you were being captured with the rebels that came with you, and you decided not to go with them, you would be killed also.

MS. LOWICKI: You were afraid of being caught by the government and also by the rebels?

EMILIA: Yes. So later, in 1999, January 6th, we somehow found courage. Myself, I started feeling courage.

The rebels came into the city again. By then, I happened to be seen by one of the commanders who captured me before. He said he couldn’t leave me because they had killed his wife, so he couldn’t leave me again in town. I wanted to escape from him, but I couldn’t because they took all of us.You couldn’t set eyes on other people. So they took me away with them. We continued to the jungle. We went from town to town, place to place. They had to train me, and I had to face many, many difficulties that I couldn’t bear, and it was very, very — really too hard for me. I decided better to die than to live in this kind of situation.

The Lord, I know he was caring for me, although we were in this kind of situation. He cares for us – even when we were in the bush – because when I was with my family, we did go to church, we are Christians. So I used to pray. When I was facing difficulties, I called on God to help me.

MS. LOWICKI: Thank you, Emilia. There’s so much in everyone’s story that everyone wants to hear, and it’s wonderful that you’re sharing with us. I’m going to ask you to hold there for just a minute, and I’m going to ask Steven and Berta just to say a little bit more about some specific things in their experience.

Emilia, you mentioned you had so many different tasks to do, hard labor, domestic labor, carrying loads, traveling with the troops, doing spy work, et cetera. What are some of things that both of you did in your experience, and did you get training to do those things?

Let’s ask Steven and then come back to Berta again. When you were taken and you were there, were you trained and then asked to do specific tasks?

STEVEN: Yes. When I was captured, they took me to Kundiu, so I didn’t have a chance to escape from them and get to my village. Then I was small, so I decided to stay with them. So after three months, they trained me as a fighter. But in this training — in the morning — when the commanders woke up, they woke us up to run for two miles. They trained us just the way they had been doing with the government soldiers. We ran in the morning for two miles. After the two miles, when we came back, they gave us water. By then, there was no food.

In fact, even the commanders, there was no food for them. So every child combatant that was staying with them, we didn’t think that we would be having food. So every morning, we ran two miles. In the training, we also learned how to use the weapon. And in case in fighting, if the weapons got stopped, we were taught how to cope with it or how to scatter them.

MS. LOWICKI: Did they tell you why they wanted you to do these things, why they had taken you?

STEVEN: Yeah. In fact, they were giving us some ideologies by saying that in the system of Sierra Leone, it was already unbearable because the government was not providing free education for the people. People were suffering because they could not send their children to school because they didn’t have money. So they wanted to kick that system off. These are the kind of ideologies that were given to us, and we were encouraged to fight with them.

MS. LOWICKI: Let’s hear also a little bit more from Berta.

What about you, Berta? When you went, it sounds like the troops were very organized. What did they ask you to do and how did they prepare you?

SECRETARY CHAO: I think Berta told us originally you protected the base, you were part of the children who protected the base. Isn’t that correct?

BERTA: Yes. When I joined at first, we did protect the base and, as part of the other children, I formed part of the special forces. The training that we got was just the same training as the adults got. We would have to jump from very high places, and we didn’t receive any special treatment. We were being trained to fight the army, just as the adults.

MS. LOWICKI: What were some of the differences between the boys’ and the girls’ experiences in all of your situations? Were girls given specific tasks to do? What do you think some of the differences for girls and boys were?

STEVEN: For the girls, when we were captured, the commanders forced them to be their wives. Some of them were raped. After raping them, maybe they would just leave them to die. Some of them, they captured them, they took them along with them. So the girls, mainly they are forced to be their wives. For us, we are trained to be fighters.

MS. LOWICKI: And what about in your experience, Berta? Were you treated differently than the boys in your group?

BERTA: They treated us equally because their ideology was to have a true democracy, equality for all. So they didn’t have any discrimination against women. They treated all of us equally.

MS. LOWICKI: Madame Secretary, do you have questions?

SECRETARY CHAO: Yes, if I could. Berta had a very difficult circumstance, but Steven and Emilia had much, much different experiences. So I think it would help for a lot of people who are listening in, if conditions are so bad, why could you not leave? Maybe that’s helpful for us to understand, and that would help us to find solutions to this as well.

MS. LOWICKI: What was hard about leaving? Berta, you also said you were wounded, but why did you end up leaving and how did you leave, and also what was hard for you, two, about leaving the force?

SECRETARY CHAO: Did you want to leave?

EMILIA: Yes.

SECRETARY CHAO: Emilia, you start. Why couldn’t you leave?

EMILIA: They could not allow us to leave by ourselves. In fact, even if we were walking on the road, there would be bodyguards around us. We would be in the middle. So even to go and fetch water, it was not easy for us. They would be shouting at us, treating us like slaves, go and get this water and come back. So it was not easy.

We wanted to escape – because we were fighting so hard. It was not easy for us. I don’t even know how to describe how we used to feel at that time, so it was not easy for us. And we were always thinking of escaping, thinking of the day when we’d be out of this kind of bondage.

STEVEN: Let me help her to explain more. You know, one of the things that actually made us not have the chance to escape is that, like what I was saying, they captured me from the east and they took me to the north. So I didn’t think I would have the chance to escape – or even to know the areas. Also, the rebels, they had a lot of camps, not only one, so if you escaped from this camp and you got to another, if you are captured -

EMILIA: - they will kill you.

STEVEN: And if the commanders knew that you escaped and you were captured in another place, they have to kill you. There is no alternative. So that is why some of us decided to stay with them.

MS. LOWICKI: I’ll take you to the next question — and we’ll get back to Berta also — but in the end, how did you end up leaving? How did you end up leaving the force? How did you get away?

STEVEN: Actually, when I was with them, I was fortunate. When it came time, they said we have to go to Freetown. That was in the year 1999 because it was decided we should go to Freetown. So they took some of us, like the group I was staying with, and they took us to Makani, one of the big towns in the northern province. I was not fortunate enough to go to Freetown. Some of my friends, they were fortunate, so they took them along. Instead, I was staying with my commander’s wife.

So later, when they went to Freetown, unfortunately for them, they were defeated. So they pulled out from Freetown. So some of them decided to stay in one of the villages. They opened another camp there. They called the camp west side. They said that we were the west side boys.

I was staying in Makani with my commander, so from there, we were told that the United Nations were now in Freetown, so everybody and the commanders – those who were having the children – they had to leave there. But I was lucky. My commander decided to release me.

MS. LOWICKI: So Steven actually was able to go, at the time of the peace agreement, when the rebels agreed to put their weapons down.

What about you, Berta?

BERTA: In my case, it was a little different because, since I was wounded or shot, the International Red Cross took me out. They took me to a hospital, and then five months later, the peace treaties were signed.

MS. LOWICKI: And how did you all feel at those moments when you left? We didn’t hear at the last minute when you were finally free, Emilia. How did you feel?

EMILIA: I got free from them when the commander that I was staying with was killed. That was the time I got to escape from them.

MS. LOWICKI: Were you still feeling fear at that moment, like you thought someone was behind you, coming after you? Or were you feeling like, I’m finally really free?

EMILIA: That was during the attack. It’s like everybody fighting for his life, his or her life. And I was standing behind him. He got shot, and I also had the fragments on my feet, so it was not easy for me. I thought I was shot. So I was not thinking of being alive. I was thinking of maybe being killed, maybe I had been. Maybe they caught me already, but I decided to run elsewhere – to maybe get myself out.

MS. LOWICKI: So for all of you, what was the first thing you were hoping for when you had finally gotten away, when you finally thought, I’m free? What was the first thing you wanted to do? Was it to go home? To find friends? What was the immediate thing you needed at that time?

STEVEN: Actually, it was to hear if our parents were alive – waiting to see them to let them know that nothing was wrong with us – that we were back.

MS. LOWICKI: Were you worried about whether they would have questions about your activity during the war? Were you worried about seeing them again, whether you would accept each other or get along, anything like that? Were you concerned about getting together with your family again for the first time?

SECRETARY CHAO: About being accepted?

STEVEN: Yes. Some families do accept their children, but some, when the children do return, they don’t accept them because some of them, when they have been in this situation, been rebels, when they entered to their village, they kill a lot of people. In fact, some children do destroy their parents because they have been changed totally. So when they came back, some parents refused to accept them, even the elders in the community. But I, I was lucky; my parents accepted me. But when I was released, I didn’t get a chance to see my parents quickly. For some time, about nine months, I waited before I got a chance to see them.

MS. LOWICKI: I’m going to ask you about those nine months. Just quickly also for Berta and Emilia, what was the first thing – I know you were able to get free in the middle of a battle, so you needed immediate safety, but after you got ou