Maimouna's face breaks into a smile as the visitor approaches. Her hair neatly coiffed in tiny braids, Maimouna is as lively as any child of three is apt to be -- even with a stump that ends just above what would have been her right elbow. A year ago, Maimouna's mother, clutching her baby, attempted to escape an attack on their village by rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). She was shot and the baby's right arm was hacked off by the rebels. Maimouna, left to die next to her mother's body, then was rescued by an uncle who fled with the child into the bush.
Today, Maimouna lives with her aunt at the Murraytown Amputee Camp, a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Freetown, home to over 1,000 amputees, war-wounded and other victims of Sierra Leone's civil war. The camp is managed by Médécins sans Frontières with the help of Cause Canada and Handicap International. It provides social work services, vocational training, physical therapy, psycho-social counseling and prosthetic aids.
Maimouna and numerous children like her, as well as thousands of youth who were abducted by and conscripted into Sierra Leone's rebel armies over the past decade, have no knowledge or memory of what constitutes a normal childhood. They have spent their formative years as victims -- and even perpetrators -- of monstrous atrocities.
Mr. Olara Otunnu, UN special representative of the Secretary-General for children and armed conflict, and Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy paid a two-day visit to Freetown in late April to assess the condition of Sierra Leone's children. They carried a message from ministers of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), who had just concluded a conference in Ghana on West Africa's war-affected youth.
UN
Special Representative Olara Otunnu speaks with a former rebel combatant
now learning weaving at a rehabilitation centre.
Photo: Margaret A. Novicki
The message, delivered personally to President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, former Armed Forces Revolutionary Council commander Johnny Paul Koroma and RUF leader Foday Sankoh, was that West African leaders would no longer tolerate the brutalization of children.
The Ghana conference called for the immediate release by armed groups of all children abducted and held against their will, and a "West African Week of Truce" to raise awareness. It urged the establishment within ECOWAS of an office on war-affected children and the early ratification by African governments of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child -- raising the minimum age for participation in conflict to 18 -- and the Statute of the International Criminal Court. The conference also decided that the protection and rights of children are to be explicitly incorporated into the mandates of ECOWAS peacekeeping missions, as well as into security training programmes.
The assumption of such responsibilities by West African leaders marked a "political turning point," said Mr. Otunnu. What was decided in Accra, added Mr. Axworthy, "has gone much further in terms of developing a specific concrete commitment to the rights of children than any other international organization has done up to now. It demonstrates that there is real leadership that African states are providing."
Such leadership is critical. Conservative estimates indicate that some 15,000 children have been exploited as child soldiers in the conflicts in Liberia and Sierra Leone. This figure is only the tip of the iceberg, with thousands more affected by physical abuse, including rape and mutilation, and deprivations of all sorts. It is believed that 80 per cent of Sierra Leonean families have been dislocated at one time or another during the war.
The plight of the child combatants is especially poignant. Kidnapped at an age as early as five or six, forced to take hard drugs and taught only how to terrorize, these children bear deep psychological scars. Many have no recollection of who their families are or where they are from. But even when their origins are known, these child fighters bear such a stigma that their families and communities often do not want them back.
Daniel, age 15, now lives at St. Michael's Lodge, an interim child care centre 14 miles from Freetown. A former RUF fighter, he and the other 150 children at St. Michael's are learning vocational skills and receiving psycho-social counseling. Most of the children seem quite small for their ages: years of malnourishment have stunted their growth. When asked what he plans for his future, Daniel says he simply wants to go to school. Even these war-hardened youth are still children at heart.
