Given the fact that the overwhelming majority of political scientists and anthropologists who researched the issue of child-soldiers participating in the world’s military conflicts, consist of liberally minded Whites, it comes as no surprise that they tend to think of a researched subject matter in terms of a phenomenon – after all, their children do not go about playing an active part in the war. This is why; they intentionally strive to endow even statistical information about the participation of child soldiers in combat with emotional undertones. For example, in his article The Use of Children as Soldiers: the Right to Kill and be Killed?, Stuart Malsen states: “At least 300,000 children under 18 years of age are taking an active part in armed conflicts – in other words killing and being killed… Although these figures give an indication of the scale of the problem, they mask the true extent of the tragedy” (1998, p. 445). Nevertheless, because utilization of children as combatants usually takes place in areas where Western concepts of morality and ethics do not define the essence of socio-political realities, the application of the phenomenological approach, in regards to the issue, appears utterly inappropriate. Therefore, the presence of child soldiers in the world’s hot spots (especially in Africa) should be thought of as a trend that came into being due to a variety of objectively existing social, political, and economic circumstances. These circumstances can be outlined as follows: 1) The fact that the workings of a child’s mentality are not being concerned with the observation of socially imposed behavioral restrictions, 2) The fact that the value of one’s life in Third World countries is being particularly low, 3) The fact that participation of child-soldiers in military confrontations helps to evaluate the problem of Third World countries’ overpopulation. In our paper, we will aim to explore this thesis even further.
Nowadays, it is being assumed by majority of Westerners that utilization of child-soldiers in combat is being essentially ‘last resort’ measure, on the part of warring parties. However, the objective reality points out to something entirely opposite – the combat effectiveness of child-soldiers often appears being much higher, as compared to that of adults. The reasons why it is being the case are outlined in Jill E. Korbin’s article Children, Childhoods, and Violence: “Children and youth may be effective combatants, valued by their commanding officers. If they have been victimized or lost loved ones, they may be dedicated fighters operating under the motivation of revenge. They are not inhibited by thoughts of their own children or dependents” (2003, p. 440). Unlike what it is the case with adults, children do not fully realize the full spectrum of consequences, associated with their engagement in violent behavior/combat. This is the reason why murders committed by children appear especially gruesome – as criminologists aware of, cases involving children killing their parents in the sleep, on the account of parents’ failure to buy these kids their favorite toys, are not utterly unusual. A child-murderer can be simultaneously both: terrified of darkness and yet capable of calmly sticking knife into offender’s body. Thus, whatever the cynical it might sound, even superficially trained children are perfect combatants, which is why their utilization in wars have always been a commonplace practice, throughout the course of human history.
Moreover, socio-political and economic realities of a Third World create additional preconditions for children to be involved in military confrontations on progressively larger scale. As it has been shown in Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen’s book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, people’s average rate of IQ in particularly black African countries, such as Congo, Uganda, Somalia and Sudan (closely associated with utilization of child-soldiers in tribal warfare), equals 50-60. This is exactly the reason, why after having been freed of ‘colonial oppression’, these countries began to rapidly regress back into primeval savagery – the less a particular individual’s rate of IQ, the more likely for him to be endowed with tribal mindedness. In its turn, one’s tribal mindedness implies such individual’s tendency to indulge in violence. Even today, the adolescent residents of many African villages are being required to kill the resident of a neighboring village, in order to prove its adulthood, in the eyes of potential brides. Therefore, there is nothing ‘phenomenological’ about the issue of child-combat. Utilization of child-soldiers in Third World’s hot spots simply reflect the objectively existing realities of post-colonial living, as such that are being closely associated with existential primitivism, on the part of its affiliates. Given people’s high birth rates in Third World, it is only natural for the value of individual’s life in areas affected by never-ending tribal warfare to be particularly low, especially when children are being concerned.
Thus, we cannot agree with naïve suggestions that the very existence of child-soldiers, in contemporary sense of this word, is being something unnatural, simply because these suggestions appear utterly euro-centric and therefore, non-applicable to the tribal realities of Third World. For example, in his article The Worldwide Tragedy of Child Soldiers, available on the web site of Common Dreams.Org, Cesar Chelala suggests that it is up to the members of international community to eliminate the issue: “International lending agencies and governments should make it clear that no rebellious group that intends to govern a country will receive aid or international recognition if the group enlisted child soldiers in its struggle for power” (2000). Apparently, while coming up with this statement, it never occurred to the author that his proposed resolution to the problem is being rather naively wishful. After all, for duration of last few decades, an international community has been trying to eliminate ‘world’s hunger’ – yet, the people in Third World countries did not become less hungry, as a result.
Neither can we agree with suggestions that utilization of child-soldiers in combat should be attributed to vaguely defined ‘world’s failure’, as it is being articulated by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in editorial Archbishop Tutu Condemns Child-Trafficking and Child-Soldiers, available on the web site of Spero News: “The death and suffering of children in times of conflict and instability make it clear that the world has failed to prioritize the rights and well-being of children” (2010). If anything, it is not due to ‘world’s wickedness’ that in Third World countries children are being increasingly used in combat, but to due to the activities of Catholic ‘lambs of God’, such as Desmond Tutu, who continue to insist that the usage of contraceptives by people represents a major sin. By being prompted to indulge in unprotected sex, people in Third World add to their countries’ acute problem of overpopulation – thus, creating objective preconditions for utilization of child-soldiers in combat, simply because, the more there are unwanted children, the more their lives are being dropped in value.
Thus, the fact that the number of child-soldiers in Third World countries increases in exponential progression to the flow of time, has nothing to do with wit ‘world’s evilness’, or with child-soldiers’ lack of education, but solely with the fact that in countries torn by tribal warfare, using such soldiers in combat makes perfectly good logical and even moral sense. After all, there can be only so much natural resources, but ‘human resources’ are fully renewable for as long as people remember how to have sex. And, as we are all aware of – citizens in ‘developing’ countries are rather talented, when comes to making babies.
Bibliography
- ‘Archbishop Tutu Condemns Child-Trafficking and Child-Soldiers’. 2010. Spero News.
- Chelala, Cesar ‘The Worldwide Tragedy of Child Soldiers’. 2000. Common Dreams. Org.
- Korbin, Jill ‘Children, Childhoods, and Violence’, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32.1 (2003): 31-446. Print.
- Lynn, Richard. & Vanhanen, Tatu. IQ and the wealth of nations. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. Print.
- Maslen, Stuart ‘The use of Children as Soldiers: the Right to Kill and be Killed?’, The International Journal of Children’s Rights 6.4 (1998): 445–451. Print.