Latest news feedRefugees Magazine Issue 131: (Africa) – Child Soldiers: Turning refugees into gunmen
Power and adventure versus poverty, boredom and isolation in a battle for the hearts and minds of the young
The recruiters came at sundown with fistfuls of cash and promises of adventure, power and women. Within three hours, 150 young Liberian men at the Nicla refugee camp in western Côte d'Ivoire had signed up to become government mercenaries in a unit nicknamed the Lima force.
They each pocketed 10,000 local CFA francs ($17), jumped aboard two trucks and, led by a fighter wearing a red bandana and brandishing a 50-calibre machine gun mounted on the back of a jeep, roared out of the camp telling other refugees who witnessed the incident, "We want money. Here we are nothing and we have nothing."
After training, these new guns for hire were expected to fight on behalf of the government against other Liberians in several invading rebel groups who were operating in and around the highly volatile border area between the two West African countries.
Nicla had been a sleepy backwater kind of place, a rural village similar to surrounding Ivorian hamlets, offering sanctuary to just a small pocket of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had fled neighbouring Liberia 35 kms to the west following more than a decade of renewed turmoil in that country.
The great majority of the Liberians integrated easily into Ivorian villages rather than moving into refugee camps, but when Côte d'Ivoire itself was wracked by civil conflict in September 2002, many of these uprooted civilians were forced to flee again. Between 6,000 and 8,000 packed into Nicla, seeking the safety of an international sponsored camp rather than run the risk of a tide of xenophobia sweeping through the countryside.
Unsurprisingly, however, given its proximity to a highly volatile border, nearby conflict and a ready pool of able-bodied male and female refugees, the camp became instead a hotbed for recruitment.
There have been regular confrontations between humanitarian ideals and military imperatives for many years, Nicla being just one of the latest and most blatant examples.
An estimated 300,000 underage child soldiers, 3,000 in Côte d'Ivoire itself, are currently serving in armies and militias around the world, some of them plucked straight from refugee camps. Untold numbers of older, but still vulnerable youths, have also been recruited. Girls are particularly vulnerable, becoming foot soldiers or sexual slaves, or both.
National governments, not humanitarian agencies, are responsible for the security of refugee camps, but when they cannot or will not enforce proper security, organizations such as UNHCR or Caritas, which is present in Nicla, face difficult choices.
When more than one million Rwandans fled from that country's genocide in the mid-1990s, the dreaded Interahamwe militias used camps in then eastern Zaire not only to recruit, but also to launch raids back into Rwanda. With the national security apparatus disintegrating, UNHCR unsuccessfully appealed to U.N. member states for military assistance and then paid for its own security force – with limited results.
Effectively, it took the controversial decision to continue caring for hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees, knowing at the same time that the gunmen were also benefiting from the aid and international humanitarian presence.
For months the agency has been working on 'solutions' for Nicla, ranging from local programmes to promote education and small self-help projects to trying to relocate the camp away from the immediate fighting zone and asking other countries to accept the most vulnerable Liberians for resettlement.
WILD WEST
But though the site was named Peace Town by the refugees, it has more the appearance of the Wild West.
A recent visitor was startled to see dozens of wildly cheering youths, accompanied by the inevitable machine gunner and his red bandana, careening through the camp on trucks in broad daylight (similar military activities in other refugee camps are often carried out more surreptitiously under the cover of darkness).
Bursts of gunfire often rupture daily routine when the 'soldiers' return to camp to visit their families. One group of school children tumbled out through both doors and windows in panic when bullets whizzed past their school house recently.
Refugees said they lived their lives on a knife-edge in such conditions. "Just talking to you like this could get me killed," one refugee said in refusing to be identified. "It is like a huge cattle barn here," another complained to a camp official. "What happens when there is a massacre? You will come back in the morning (UNHCR workers do not live in the camp overnight) to collect the dead bodies. And that will be our bodies."
It is easy to understand the military lure for young refugees. Ivorians, often with the same tribal background, who once welcomed them, now look on most Liberians as 'rebels' and areas surrounding Nicla have become 'no go' areas. Cooped up in their camp, there is no work, no money, spreading poverty, little education and few other activities for the refugees – only stifling boredom and growing resentment and fear.
In such circumstances many feel they have no alternative but to 'join up.' Others are attracted to the excitement and the raw power afforded to anyone with a gun.
Young girls have been recruited and are affected in other less direct ways. Some can now earn money through a flourishing prostitution racket, servicing the newly affluent young fighters. There is sexual harassment (a 12-year-old who was being ritually abused by men was recently moved to new foster parents), but other young girls, who should be in school, willingly become drinking partners in the camp's six or seven bars and then girlfriends of the gunmen.
Jette Isaksen has worked in Rwanda, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Liberia, but her current job as a field officer visiting Nicla daily is different to those other frontline assignments. "I've never been so scared as here," she said walking around the camp. "I don't like the mood."
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 131: "Africa At A Crossroads" (June 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (730Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here
