When he is sitting in a chair, little Rene Bahati's thin legs don't reach the ground. His slender fingers look to feeble to pull a trigger. But he said he has killed at least one person for every year he has lived. Some of them were unarmed civilians. He is 10 years old.
"I shot them all," he says in a dull, emotionless voice. "I didn't feel a thing".
Child soldiers have long been fixtures in Africa's lingering civil wars. An estimated 300,000 children younger than age 18 are fighting in 30 nations, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, dozens of militias and armies have utilizes juvenile fighters called "kadogos", or little ones, some of them as young as 8, since 1996, when a rebellion began that toppled U.S. backed strongman Mobutu Sese Seko.
Now, for the first time, Rene and other child soldiers in the Congo may face a new, more formidable enemy: U.N. peacekeepers with shoot-to-kill orders.
These child soldiers grow up in a "family" of beer-drinking, drug-taking thugs who loot houses and rape women and girls just for fun. School is a camp where they learn to shoot and stab people; and their favorite toy is a Soviet-made rifle.
THIS is just ONE account of ONE area around the globe that use children to do their dirty work, that I have read about. Easy to mold, cheap to hire, children make good and obedient killers. They are plucked from villages or refugee camps at an age which they don't know right from wrong and shoved into military life. The kids think it is a game. You give them drugs and a gun, and they become small Rambo's.
Will the U. N. peacekeepers engage children soldiers in battle? "They ARE child soldiers, but they ARE carrying weapons and they ARE shooting" is the reply from the U.N. spokesman.
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