The Child Veterans of South Sudan Want to Know: Will Americans Support Them?
The US provided aid and assistance to Sudanese rebels—even as they employed child soldiers.
Nick Turse June 4, 2015
Pibor, South Sudan—“I’ve never been a soldier,” I say to the wide-eyed, lanky-limbed veteran sitting across from me. “Tell me about military life. What’s it like?” He looks up as if the answer can be found in the blazing blue sky above, shoots me a sheepish grin, and then fixes his gaze on his feet. I let the silence wash over us and wait. He looks embarrassed. Perhaps it’s for me. Interviews sometimes devolve into such awkward, hushed moments. I’ve talked to hundreds of veterans over the years. Many have been reluctant to discuss their tours of duty for one reason or another. It’s typical. But this wasn’t the typical veteran—at least not for me. Osman put in three years of military service, some of it during wartime. He saw battle and knows the dull drudgery of a soldier’s life. He had left the army just a month before I met him. Osman is 15 years old.
Young people the world over join militaries for all sorts of reasons—for a steady paycheck, to be a part of something greater than themselves, to measure up, to escape their homes, because they crave structure or excitement or adventure, because they have no better options, because they’re forced to. Osman joined a militia called the Cobra faction, he told me, after soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, or SPLA—the national armed forces of South Sudan—shot and killed his father. It seemed to be the only option open to him. It afforded him protection, care, a home.
Osman was released from his military service in February and he wasn’t alone. In recent months, more than 1,700 children have been demobilized by the Cobra faction. But they’re the exceptions in South Sudan. Today, about 13,000 other children are serving with the SPLA or the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-In Opposition, a rebel force at war with the government, or with other militias and armed groups jockeying for power in that civil-war-wracked country.
Despite a law prohibiting it, the United States looked the other way while this went on, providing aid and assistance to the SPLA even as it employed child soldiers. Year after year, President Obama provided waivers to sidestep the 2008 Child Soldiers Prevention Act, by which Congress prohibited the United States from providing military assistance to governments filling out their ranks with children. It was just one facet of years of support, dating back to the 1980s, that saw the United States “midwife”—as then-chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee John Kerry put it—South Sudan into existence.
For nearly a decade leading up to the 2011 declaration of independence, the cause of the nation and its citizens was one that was near and dear to the heart of two successive U.S. administrations and some of its most seasoned and effective thinkers and policymakers,” Patricia Taft, a senior associate with the Fund for Peace, wrote in an analysis of South Sudan last year. “In order to secure this nation-building ‘win,’ both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations poured tons of aid into South Sudan, in every form imaginable. From military aid to food aid to the provision of technical expertise, America was South Sudan’s biggest ally and backer, ardently midwifing the country into nationhood by whatever means necessary.
In the case of child soldiers, waivers were seen as a necessity when it came to helping build “an accountable and professional armed force,” in the words of Andy Burnett of the Office of the Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan; that is, an ethical, modern military that would ultimately eschew the use of children. The results were just the opposite. The SPLA fractured in December 2013 and was soon implicated in the commission of mass atrocities and increased recruitment of child soldiers. The war that has wracked the country since has been especially ruinous for South Sudan’s youth. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), around 600,000 children have been affected by psychological distress, 400,000 have been forced out of school, 235,000 are at risk of severe acute malnutrition, and more than 700 have been killed during a year and a half of civil war.
Keep reading: http://www.thenation.com/article/209201/child-veterans-south-sudan-want-know-will-americans-support-them#
Is there anything worse than turning children into killing machines?
