Child Soldiers With The Farc In Colombia



Child Soldiers With The Farc In Colombia

Thesis Statement

Young people do indeed suffer in armed conflict around the world. Nevertheless, they may fight and experience military recruitment in ways that the contemporary discourse on child soldiers does not capture or anticipate. Indeed, the aim of this report is to investigate how the well-intentioned global humanitarian discourse on child soldiers may be disregarding the complex local understandings and experiences of military recruitment.

Background

Currently, there is strong evidence of significant ties and complicity between the national army and the rightwing paramilitary groups. The Colombian army allegedly provides these groups with information and ammunition and allows them to carry out their criminal activities. Military personnel even join these groups when off duty. Moreover, members of the armed forces themselves have frequently committed abuses either collectively or individually, such as arbitrary arrests or indiscriminate killings or sexual harassment. In 2001, the Colombian Congress passed a law of defense and national security through which it limited the capacity of the Attorney General's Office to start investigations on the involvement of military in human rights violations. This law also allows military personnel to arrest and interrogate suspects and to hold them in preventive detention for longer periods of time before turning them over to the courts. I seek to present a compelling case for a wholesale re-conceptualisation of the phenomenon of 'child soldiers' so as to devise aid programmes that can better reflect and respond to local understandings, priorities, and needs. The first chapter will examine how the global discourse takes a rights-based approach to the issue of 'child soldiers' and conceptualises children and childhood in a way that renders all forms of children's military participation barbaric and abhorrent. To aid the readers' understanding, I will review the historical development, provide specific examples, and outline the key components and assumptions of the discourse. The use of children as soldiers has been universally condemned as abhorrent and unacceptable. Yet over the last ten years hundreds of thousands of children have fought and died in conflicts around the world. The approach to understanding and addressing the issue of 'child soldiers' at the global level has been dominated by the rights-based approach; that is, humanitarian agencies conceptualise 'child soldiering' in terms of a clear violation of universal children's rights and a breach of international humanitarian law. Here, the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has played a critical role.

It declared that children 'should grow up in a family environment, in an atmosphere of happiness, love and understanding' and charged adults and governments to help fulfil various rights of children (CRC Preamble). The adoption and the near universal ratification of CRC8 brought the issue of children's rights and protection to the forefront of international development and the humanitarian agenda during the 1990s Furthermore, as Pupavac (1998, 2000, 2001) argues, the institutionalisation of children's rights in international law has taken place in response to a deep sense of moral, political, and ...