Background:
Help End the Use of Child Soldiers.
Today an estimated 250,000 children are serving in armed conflict and hundreds of thousands more are members of armed forces who could be sent into combat at any time. These "child soldiers" include boys and girls, sometimes as young as six years old, serving in government armies, government-linked militias, and armed opposition groups. They serve in all aspects of contemporary warfare as spies, messengers, guards, cooks, porters, security officers, and too often, as front-line combatants. Many female child soldiers are forced to serve as sex slaves or "brides" of military commanders.
Although many child soldiers are found in non-government armed opposition groups, the State Department reports that governments in nine countries are implicated in supporting the recruitment or use of child soldiers. The U.S. government provides military assistance to eight of them.
Some of these governments recruit children into their own armed forces, while others are directly linked to paramilitaries or militias that use children in warfare. They include: Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda. U.S. military assistance to these countries ranges from relatively small amounts of funding for military training to hundreds of millions in weapons, training, and military financing.
According to Allan Rock, a UN Special Advisor on Children and Armed Conflict, in November 2006, for example, there is "strong and credible evidence" that elements of the Sri Lankan security forces were "supporting and sometimes participating in the abductions and forced recruitment of children by the Karuna faction." The Karuna group is a break-away armed faction of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), now fighting against the LTTE. In fiscal year 2006, the United States provided just over $4 million in military assistance to the Sri Lankan government. The LTTE also has a record of recruiting and using children in combat.
The Child Soldier Prevention Act (S. 1175) is a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Sam Brownback (R-KS). It would restrict five categories of US military assistance (International Military Education and Training, Foreign Military Financing, Foreign Military Sales, Direct Commercial Sales, and Excess Defense Articles) to governments described above until they end any involvement in the recruitment or use of child soldiers. The bill would not automatically cut off these military assistance programs; governments taking concrete steps to end child recruitment and demobilize child soldiers would remain eligible for assistance directed solely towards the professionalization of their forces for up to two years before any prohibition on assistance would be imposed.
This bill would provide clear incentives for governments currently implicated
in the recruitment and use of child soldiers to end this practice and demobilize
children from their forces. It also encourages the United States to expand funding
to rehabilitate former child soldiers and would work with the international
community to bring to justice armed oppositional groups that kidnap children
for use as soldiers.
