The New York Times

Monday, January 24, 2000

An Accord on Child Soldiers

From Colombia and Chechnya to Congo and Sierra Leone, some 300,000 child soldiers -- some as young as 10 -- are killing, raping and maiming in today's conflict zones. Press-ganged or lured by the promise of booty or revenge, many of them orphans, some not much taller than their automatic rifles, children are among the most readily brutalized participants in modern warfare.

So the new international protocol banning the use of child soldiers, agreed to last week in Geneva, is a salutary achievement. The new accord will revise the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, raising the minimum age for participants in armed conflicts from 15 to 18.

The Clinton administration, under pressure from the Pentagon, had previously blocked progress on the accord, insisting that any agreement allow the United States to continue sending volunteers as young as 17 into combat. But after months of resistance, the Pentagon accepted a compromise allowing it to continue recruiting and training 17-year-olds while taking "all feasible measures" to keep them out of combat. That cleared the way for an agreement that is after all aimed not primarily at the United States but at third-world countries and rebel insurgencies for which children are the cheapest and most expendable killers and cannon fodder.

It is noteworthy that the chief American negotiator on the protocol, Michael Southwick, has had first-hand exposure to the problem of child soldiers as a former ambassador to Uganda, a country with a long history of such exploitation. Uganda's national army, which came to power in the 1980's in part by arming orphans, is currently fighting a rebel insurgency in the north, known as the Lord's Resistance Army, which has abducted thousands of children for use as soldiers and sex slaves.

This new protocol will provide a valuable basis for nations to exert political and diplomatic pressure on states and rebel movements that seek legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. Combined with the new International Criminal Court, whose governing statute, agreed upon in 1998 over American objections, defined the recruitment or use of children under 15 as a war crime, this new accord represents a potentially powerful instrument for combating this horrific form of exploitation.