Four countries where child soldiers are still recruited

Colombia’s largest guerrilla group has agreed to release all of its soldiers under age 15. It is a move welcomed by child rights groups but it also highlights the continued use of child soldiers in conflicts around the world.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) made the pledge during talks in Cuba aimed at ending its five-decade war against successive governments. The administration of Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC now need to decide upon the terms under which the child soldiers will be reintegrated into civilian life.

“UNICEF stands ready to support the release of all children and their reintegration into their families and communities, in accordance with national and international law,” the UN agency’s representative to Colombia, Roberto de Bernardi, said in a statement yesterday.

Reintegration is the hardest part of demobilisation. It’s easy to release child soldiers from service, but what do they do then? Often, they have been deprived of education and have only the skills they picked up while under arms. Aid agencies offer support for former child soldiers by funding programmes to provide them with education, skills training and micro-loans to start small businesses, but the children often find it hard to adjust to new lives.

According to principles adopted at a Paris conference led by UNICEF, a child soldier is anyone under age 18 “who is or who has been recruited or used by an armed force or armed group in any capacity”, which can include non-combat roles such as cooks and porters.

It’s not only rebel groups that recruit child soldiers. Some state militaries recruit children too.

Here are four examples of the use of child soldiers around the world:

Britain: Rights groups have campaigned to end the army’s practice of recruiting 16-year-olds. Some 17-year-olds were deployed to the Gulf War in 1991, and to Kosovo in 1999, but the army subsequently barred anyone under 18 from combat. The army requires parental consent for any recruit under the age of 18, but Child Soldiers International says the recruitment process does not guarantee that such consent has been given.

Myanmar: As part of its reform process, the military signed a joint action plan with the UN in 2012 to demobilise all child soldiers. It has released them sporadically over the last four years, most recently this past March. The task is harder than it may appear: families sometimes send young sons to join the army for financial reasons, and recruitment may be ongoing in remote areas although the military officially banned the practice and even set up a telephone hotline to report child soldiers in its ranks. The UN lists seven non-state armed groups in Myanmar that also use child soldiers.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: More than 30,000 children were released from the national army between 2004 and 2006 as part of a military reform process following a peace agreement in 2002. However, the reforms were not successful and the war did not end. Those failures also represented a big step backwards for those advocating the release of child soldiers. Recruitment continues today, and hundreds of children are reported to be serving in the armed forces, according to Child Soldiers International. Many more have been recruited by rebel groups.

South Sudan: Even before splitting from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan passed laws that made it illegal to use child soldiers and began releasing them. But in December 2013, the world’s newest country descended into civil war and the recruitment of child soldiers began anew.

The writer is IRIN Asia Editor