"Why We Fight": Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone
Journal article by Krijn Peters, Paul Richards; Africa, Vol. 68, 1998

Young people are the major participants in most wars. In the African civil wars of the last twenty years combatants have become increasingly youthful. Some forces are made up largely of young teenagers. Combatants may sometimes be as young as 8 or 10. Girl fighters are increasingly common.

This is partly demographic. Africa is not only the world's poorest continent, it is also its youngest. Half or more of the population of African countries are under the age of 18 years. Militia life offers training and a livelihood in countries where poverty and numbers overwhelm education and jobs. But the trend to more youthful combatants also reflects the discovery that children--their social support disrupted by war--make brave and loyal fighters. The company of comrades-in-arms becomes a family substitute.

Technology also facilitates the rise in the number of child combatants. Battle kit was once too heavy, and too expensive, for children to handle. Automatic rifles are now light enough for a 10 year old. Cheap but efficient rifles flood the continent. An AK47, firing thirty bullets per trigger pull, costs the equivalent of the price of a goat (Machel, 1996).

Confusing war and play, child combatants are heedless of danger. Groups of youngsters in bush wars operate on their own initiative for long periods in remote terrain, sometimes without even radio to convey commands. Incompletely socialised, they make up rules of war as they go. Civilians bear the brunt of the unpredictable atrocity.

There are two main adult reactions. The first is to stigmatise youth combatants as evil (as `bandits' and `vermin'). Many under-age recruits are from remote rural regions. Poorly educated, they are readily despised by urbanised elites. Elites always fear `unwashed' youth. Africa is no exception. Sometimes, as in Liberia and Sierra Leone, colonially rooted attitudes to interior peoples reinforce the stigmatisation of young rural combatants as `barbarians'.

The other reaction (regularly espoused by agencies working with children) is to see young fighters as victims (Goodwin-Gill and Cohn, 1994, Human Rights Watch, 1994; Brett and McCallin, 1996)---as tools of undemocratic military regimes or brutally unscrupulous `warlords'.

But, as will be seen, many under-age combatants choose to fight with their eyes open, and defend their choice, sometimes proudly. Set against a background of destroyed families and failed educational systems, militia activity offers young people a chance to make their way in the world.

The exemplary report by Graca Machel (1996) for the United Nations on children and war rightly cautions us against seeing child soldiers solely as victims of war. It is important to pay due attention to their agency in conflict. As rational human actors, they have an at times quite surprisingly mature understanding of their predicament.

The purpose of the present article is to let young combatants explain themselves direct (cf. Cairns, 1996). The reader is left to decide whether they are the dupes and demons sometimes supposed.

WAR IN SIERRA LEONE

The civil war in Sierra Leone began on 23 March 1991. The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (henceforth RUF/SL) sought to mobilise a socially excluded youth underclass to form a `people's army' to overthrow the All-party Congress regime of President Joseph Momoh. The RUF/SL drew some of its inspiration from the populist youth politics advocated in the Libyan Green Book (Gaddafi, n.d.). The leader of the RUF/SL, a cashiered army corporal, Foday Saybana Sankoh, trained as a guerrilla in Benghazi.

Following the precedent of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), the RUF/SL chose to try and establish itself in an isolated border region (Kailahun and Pujehun Districts) alienated from the regime in power. At the outset the movement was assisted by hired Liberian fighters. The brutal terror tactics of the Liberian `special forces' alienated local populations.
The RUF/SL abducted and trained numbers of captured border-zone youths. Some came from the most isolated and run-down schools in the country. Others were young `tributors' working alluvial diamond mining pits for Lebanese and Sierra Leonean merchant `supporters'. Abductees cooperated with the movement to save their lives, but some found the movement's analysis of the breakdown of Sierra Leonean society meaningful and accepted guerrilla training willingly.(1)

Opposed to the RUF/SL was an ill equipped government army, the Republic of Sierra Leone Military Force (henceforth RSLMF). Inexperienced war-front junior officers quickly learnt to survive by copying RUF/SL guerrilla tactics, including the recruitment and training of under-age irregulars. Much of the fighting was done by these locally recruited irregulars, less daunted than RSLMF soldiers by RUF/SL cadres prepared for combat with fear-inhibiting drugs.
In April 1992 a pay revolt by some war-front junior officers escalated into a full-blown coup against the Momoh presidency from within the RSLMF. The young coup-makers formed the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC). Believing it had radicalised the coup-makers at the war front, the RUF/SL expected to be invited to share in some kind of government of national unity (RUF/SL, 1995).

But civilian, and especially capital city, political elements rallied to...

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