3 Tampines Street 73
Singapore 528705
(+65) 810 44 029
Mr. Declan MacFadden
Chair of The UWCSEA Foundation
Dear Mr. Declan MacFadden,
My name is Sewen Thy, I am one of the many Cambodian scholars that started at United World College of South-East Asia(UWCSEA) as a profound result of The Foundation effort. As of now, the Grade 8 students at UWCSEA are discussing child soldiers and as you may be aware almost 19 million children around the world are ex-soldiers. Some are receiving the rehabilitation they deserve but some are not. UWCSEA is a really wonderful, and loving school that can become a really effective and powerful rehabilitation centre that will transform a fierce soldier into a loving educated child. Thus I propose to the Foundation to take in scholars that were child soldiers and rehabilitate them here as they deserve the rehabilitation.
I think you should know that these children do not know what they are doing. Each time a war is started, they don’t even have a choice whether to join or not. They are being forcefully recruited. If you’ve read Ishmael Beah’s “A Long Way Gone” you wouldn’t miss his description of how the rebels are recruiting him. They have patrols all over the area and when they find children, they would pick some of them to recruit and initiate them by killing those who weren’t chosen as their reason would be “We are going to initiate all of you by killing these people in front of you. We have to do this to show you blood and make you strong. You’ll never see any of these people again, unless you believe in life after death.” (excerpt from page 34). This clearly suggests that they have to go through a traumatic experience already before they are even recruited. Since they’ve already have a taste of killing and believe the rebels persuasion that there are no consequences of doing so but there will be consequences if they don’t do it; they will make a forceful and uneducated choice to join the force.
It’s easy to think that every child soldier knows what they are doing, opposing to my first argument, as there are examples such as Omar Khadr, who is “the Al-Qaeda child soldier” and Ishmael was also promoted to a squad leader or “junior lieutenant” that suggest that they start innocently but then later become more knowledgeable but still continue in what they were doing and becoming a higher rank officer. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t miss the point that Ishmael stated in his book, implicitly, after being rehabilitated that he regretted it and when the war hit Freetown city, “Mohamed[his friend] and I[Ishmael] looked at each other: “Not again.” (excerpt from page 202) which clearly indicates that he never wants to go to war again. Khadr has never been rehabilitated either so how can we know if he won’t become like Ishmael? To be fair, according to rescue.org, “Since 1999, the IRC's Child Protection Program in Sierra Leone has helped facilitate disarmament and demobilization of some 2,000 child combatants, and provided them with emergency aid in our Interim Care Centers.To date, we have successfully traced and reunified 1,157 of these children and adolescents with their families and helped them with the difficult process of adjusting to life in their communities.” This also clearly suggest that at least half of the child soldiers are rehabilitated and being sent back to civilization with their family. It’s just a matter of giving them the opportunity and time to be rehabilitated.
Subsequently, most people argue that not all of the child soldiers are being forcefully recruited or just don’t have a choice. While it might be true that many child soldiers have other reasons to join the army. To be fair even the UNICEF factsheet reveals that some children join the military in order to, “seek revenge for violence enacted against them or their families.” There is a point to be made that there are a lot of other factors involving the children choosing process, as the UNICEF factsheet also explained that “others are driven to join by poverty, abuse and discrimination.” This evidence suggest that not only they are living in dangerous situation just because of gunshots but they are in poverty so if they don’t join the force they’ll starve to death, and not just the rebels are involved in recruiting children, governments are too, thus if the rebels discriminated against them, or hurt their family, who wouldn’t want to join the government to stop the rebels? They think they are doing it for a good cause and you can’t blame a child brian to pick that choice as according to my first argument.
On top of that, when it is peaceful, we all talk a lot about the abuse of children, child abuser or child labour recruiters, etc... are to face trial; even here in UWCSEA no teachers will ever hurt a student either physically or mentally, but why are we not considering that fact when it is wartime, children are being forced to serve the military, force to kill their own family, drugged them... these are forms of abuses,physically and mentally, and labour of children during wartime and yet we are only focusing on the part where they are killing because they have to for their own survival. On the contrary, people often argue that we should not look at it that way, they are killers, whether they are forced or not, imagine if you are the victim and that child just killed your whole family and burn down your house, everything you’ve ever worked for gone at the hand of a child, wouldn’t you want justice for yourself, would you just let that person go just because it’s a child? While this maybe true, but when you look at this who is the victim here? Just the your family or is it both your family and the child? Who is the perpetrator here? The child or the commander? Would the child face death if he/she didn’t kill your family? They never had a choice.
After seeing all of my reasoning, I hope that you will understand that child soldiers can be and should be rehabilitated, their conscience is hard to change but it can be changed by meeting the right person and that right person is us. Therefore, I ask you to give them a chance to change back from a fierce soldier to loving child of a society that accept them and doesn’t discriminate against them.
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Sewen Thy
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