Children victims of civil war

Young children return home in Sierra Leone after a 10-year civil war, many scarred physically and mentally. They witnessed war first-hand. They were soldiers.\nAccording to an article in The Christian Science Monitor, thousands upon thousands of young children are kidnapped and forced to fight in civil and regional wars. An estimated 5,000 children were forced into service by Sierra Leone's rebel armies. In war, the child soldiers were forced to carry out amputations in their own communities. As they return home to their former neighborhoods, some encounter understandable rejection and apprehension. \n"These children are terrified that they will be rejected when they return home," Maurice Ellie, a child demobilization officer at the non-governmental organization Caritas, told The Christian Science Monitor. "We tell them there can be forgiveness." \nBut many of these former soldiers carry the physical scars of brutal civil war: the initials "RUF," for Revolutionary United Front, carved into their skin using razors, broken glass and knives in an effort to prevent their escape from rebel camps. \nSeveral NGOs and the United Nations are working to reintroduce these children to their communities, even with the help of a plastic surgeon who was brought in to remove the brandings.\nBut Sierra Leone is just one of more than a dozen African nations saddled with such problems. \nIn Burundi, around 250-300 male students, aged 16 to 21, were abducted from their school by Hutu rebels Nov. 9, in addition to more than 50 children, aged 10 to 16, and some teachers taken Nov. 6, according to BBC reports.\nIt is believed they will either be trained as rebel soldiers, or simply be used as human shields.\nAlthough a new coalition government was instituted two weeks ago after an agreement brokered by former South African president Nelson Mandela, two rebel groups didn't sign-on and continue fighting the war that began in 1993. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed during the eight-year war.\nIn Sudan, about 10,000 children under 18 are among the ranks of the Southern People's Liberation Army, now in its 18th year of battling against the country's Islamic government. \n"Some of the more despicable warlords, like Liberia's President Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front, and Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, have routinely kidnapped children of all ages and turned the boys into killing machines," former U.S. ambassador Dennis Jett writes in The Monitor. "Part of Mr. Taylor's forces, for instance, was known as the Small Boys Unit."\nThe West has a hand to play in African affairs -- and, more importantly, a responsibility to bear, for the atrocities we allow to continue without some intervention. The African people didn't set up the old colonial system themselves. We forced it upon them. What comes in its aftermath is partly the responsibility of former colonial powers.\nFormer President Bill Clinton signed a U.N. treaty in May 2000 that bans the use of children under 18 in armed conflict. The Senate should ratify it. \nThere are a couple objections to U.S. ratification. First, our own military permits 17-year-olds to join with parental consent. But the treaty only prohibits their involvement in armed conflict, not training or use in non-combat activities. Second, conservatives who generally oppose our involvement in U.N. treaties anyway object that this one takes away parents' rights over their children. \nAn estimated 300,000 children under age 18 are fighting in armed conflicts worldwide. \nThe use of child soldiers is abhorrent. The United States cannot sit-back and let it continue so freely and pervasively.