Your researchers are doing lovely work. We monitor that, as you do, of course, because of our research work and the fieldwork.
The first thing is that, as you alluded to and the article explains, there's no such thing as a volunteer child soldier. In this country, people volunteer to join the military because it's an arm of the government that's doing work for it. In countries in conflict, children will gravitate to it because there's nothing else. The family's been destroyed. There's no work, socio-economics.... They've been sold off to forces. It's the only place where they think they might have protection.
In a lot of the prevention work we're involved with, we're educating children not to get sucked in by promises of education and a better life, as you've seen with ISIS, by joining non-state actors in becoming child soldiers. The volunteerism is not a clear volunteerism. It's under duress. As such, it's a term we have to be very, very cautious with.
Their movement, however, toward those organizations comes from the points you have raised: where is the distribution of wealth, where is the employment, and what do we do with that? We're in the business of getting kids out of being used and/or preventing them from being used. When we get them out of these and we hand them over to people like UNICEF to then rehabilitate and reintegrate—because that's my business—our concern is the re-recruitment of the children.
After they've spent three months in rehabilitation to be a cobbler, in a country where they don't wear any shoes, then they all of a sudden look around and see there's nothing for them, well, what do they do? They are easily preyed upon to be re-recruited, and the cycle starts over again. The follow-through is not the fact that there's not enough money going into rehabilitation and reintegration. It is the fact that the construct of the society around it has not stabilized, and they have no other options available to them once they demobilize.
What is crucial is making them ineffective, if they recruit them. If they're useless, if all they're doing is eating their food, and they can't use them because we have found ways and tactics to make them ineffective, if their operational capabilities are kept at such a low level because they can't train them to a higher level to actually win something or to gain something, if we can continue to move that, we will then make them ineffective and they won't be recruited by the non-state actors or hard-liners because they'll be ineffective, useless to them, and a liability.
How you handle them after that remains the world of the NGO community. I have to tell you that since Graça Machel, the widow of Nelson Mandela, did her major study in 1996, all those years we spent billions on rehabilitation and reintegration, a lot of kids have been killed while being used, but that hasn't reduced the numbers of child soldiers. Only if we get into the front end, where we're working and changing the nature of what it is to be a child soldier and the nature of how the security forces face them, and we make them ineffective, only then are we seeing the reduction. We're already reducing the number of al Shabaab kids in Somalia through our work, because they're seeing it as a no-win.
Yes, pick up on the socio-economics. Yes, go after the extraction industry. Go after, maybe, even the Chinese government, which is building roads to only the extraction industry sites and not where the population needs the roads. I have no problem with going after those things, but what you cannot ignore is the fact that, unless you break the back of the whole of the security scenario in which children are being used as instruments of war, you will not end the war.
We call it “generational war”. We have girls in the Congo who have been recruited very young and have had children. Their children are now fighting as child soldiers. We create generational wars by using kids.
Go after all that other stuff, but give assets to change the nature of the conflict itself by changing the tactics and the use of children.