Reporter’s Diary: Heal Somalia’s former child soldiers, heal a nation

“Sometimes I wake up screaming”

Even by Mogadishu standards, late September was particularly violent.

Amino Hussein Hassan, a female law student, was shot dead on her university campus. Yahye Amir, a prominent economics professor and political analyst, escaped an assassination attempt when a bomb strapped to his car exploded, killing his brother. And Ahmed Mukhtar Salah, from the long-marginalised minority Bantu community, was beaten and burnt to death by a mob after his nephew married an ethnic Somali woman.

Violence has been a way of life in Somalia since the outbreak of the civil war in 1991, seeping deep into the nation’s marrow as clan conflict gradually morphed into an all-out war against the al-Qaeda affiliated Islamist group al-Shabab. “The layers of violence that people have had to digest is one of the key problems for building a peaceful and healthier society,” Laetitia Bader, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told me recently.

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No child soldiers: The next steps in Central African Republic

At least 12,000 children have returned from armed groups in CAR. Now what?

Last September, Central African Republic became the 167th country to ratify the UN child soldier treaty, known by its acronym, OPAC. The government thus committed to outlawing the use of child soldiers.

Yet verified cases of child recruitment quadrupled in 2017 compared to 2016, according to the UN’s latest Children and Armed Conflict report, with 196 boys and 103 girls affected. The numbers are likely far greater; with 80 percent of the country controlled by armed groups, confirming child recruitments is an onerous task.

More difficult still is ensuring that the 12,000 children who are known to have returned home since 2014 integrate back into society and resist joining up again – as well as ensuring that new children aren’t recruited.

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It is time to end the child soldier stereotype

From Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo to Myanmar and Nigeria, countless children remain trapped in armed conflict.

The UN Secretary General’s 2017 Report on Children and Armed Conflict names 56 non-state armed groups and seven state armed forces in 14 countries that recruit children.

Escalating conflicts have led to a spike in child recruitment in several regions. Deepening unrest in Congo saw more than 3,000 child soldiers recruited in 2017, levels in the Middle East have doubled, while the shocking scale of recruitment in South Sudan was laid bare again this month by Human Rights Watch.

“In conflicts around the world, children have become frontline targets, used as human shields, killed, maimed and recruited to fight. Rape, forced marriage, abduction and enslavement have become standard tactics,” a UNICEF statement declared in December.

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