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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Colombia's civil war puts children on the front lines.
Jan 11, 2001 | When they came to recruit Ana, they told her she wouldn't have to work and that she could see her mom and her grandmother whenever she wanted. Instead, leftist guerrillas taught the 13-year-old girl how to kill and marched her off to fight in the mountains of northern Colombia, where she nearly starved before surrendering.
"I was aware that on any day I could die, or that I might get hurt," said Ana (not her real name). "But I didn't cry once during the fighting."
It has long been known that the numerous armed factions in the Andean nation's 36-year civil conflict have used children to fight their battles, but the stories that Ana and others like her tell about their defeated guerrilla column -- part of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC -- reveal that the problem is worse than anyone thought.
In a series of skirmishes that began in November, 128 guerrillas enlisted in the so-called Arturo Ruiz Column have either surrendered or been captured by the Colombian army, while an additional 63 -- including 27 children -- have been killed. The approximately 170 insurgents who survived the pummeling are now surrounded and being worn down by at least 1,000 soldiers, who are reveling in their lopsided victory after a series of bruising defeats suffered by the army in other parts of the country.
"From the stats coming out of this event, we've gathered that 46 percent of the original group were children," said Carol De Rooy, director of the UNICEF office in Colombia. "If this sample is realistic, we are grossly underestimating the number of children in this armed conflict. Either that, or they're putting the kids out on the front lines, which is just as bad."
The use of children in combat isn't a problem unique to Colombia: Some 300,000 kids under age 18 are fighting in armed conflicts throughout the world. But the probability that Colombia's factions have bumped up recruitment of children is particularly worrying here, where peace talks are on the brink of collapse and fighting is expected to intensify.
Beginning this month, Colombian counternarcotics troops -- trained and equipped through a $1.3 billion aid package from the United States -- are expected to push into the rebel-controlled southern state of Putumayo, which produces most of the country's cocaine, to destroy coca crops and drug labs. Since the 15,000-strong FARC bankrolls its insurgency partly by protecting peasant-owned drug crops and labs and then charging millions of dollars a year for its services, both Colombian and U.S officials expect heavy resistance from the guerrillas.
For the poor village children who constitute the majority of the youngest recruits to FARC, promises of glory, adventure and a paycheck are often irresistible. Most of them, though, end up shuttling messages between isolated rebel groups or trudging through the dense countryside, alternately attacking and running from better-trained and better-fed army and right-wing paramilitary fighters.
According to the army and human rights groups, most of the 6,000 children believed to be fighting in Colombia's civil war are members of FARC, which has been trying to topple the Colombian government since the '60s, under the direction of its aging founder, Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda.
Children also are recruited by the nation's smaller, leftist National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the right-wing paramilitary groups bent on destroying the guerrillas. The government once staffed its military offices with teenagers, but phased out the last of them in 1999. The number of children killed each year in combat here is unknown.
"The violence they see isn't easy to forget," said Nelson Ortiz, a psychologist with UNICEF in Colombia. "War is hard enough for adults, but imagine how it is for children, who don't have the experience or the development to deal with what they've seen and done."
