A Long Way Gone - Ishmael Beah

B. has the largest number of child soldiers in the world. According to a recent study by Human Rights Watch, 20% of the military are under 18, amongst the ethnic rebel groups fighting, what amounts to the longest running civil war in the world, children are also recruited. Some as young as eleven. They come to avenge the killings of their parents, to escape desperate poverty and the destruction of their homes or just to gain identity. In a confirmation of my last blog, yes they are indeed almost exclusively male. Interviews with children in the temporary and vastly inadequate schools of the internally displaced reveal all the girls want to be teachers and all the boys rebel soldiers.

As elsewhere, the increase of small, light weapons has had a massive impact on the ability of child soldiers to wield power and influence. As elsewhere, cocktails of drugs are used, along with violent movies and a slow system of brutalisation, to create soldiers who wield a rational that responds to brute force and drugs. The number is growing.

They are often sold into the military by corrupt or desperate police or government officials. Street children are rounded up at markets or in slums, occasionally the military will raid schools. Effectively taken hostage, these kids parents, should they have parents and should they care, can bribe the officials with three or four hundred dollars to get their child back. Three or Four hundred is a lot for a country that despite being the most resource rich in Asia, thanks to forty six years of living in a military regime, is now one of the most impoverished in the world. Children are often told that, because they are not carrying ID they will end up in the infamous prisons, complete with torture tracks, if they do not fight.

Reading about B.'s child soldiers issue timed in well with the finishing of a book written by a child soldier from Sierra Leone. In it Ishmael Beah accounts his journey as carefully and honest as he was deadly. It is called "A Long Way Gone" and I would highly recommend it - although I admit to having dreams plagued by dark thoughts since I finished it on the train last night.