President Obama couldn’t have been
more eloquent. Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance,
he said: “When a little boy is kidnapped,
turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed – that’s slavery.”
Denouncing Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and offering aid to
Uganda and its neighbors in tracking Kony down, he said, “It’s part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that
is the LRA and help realize a future where no African child is stolen from their
family, and no girl is raped, and no boy is turned into a child soldier.”
In support of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he has lauded as “not only a great
champion of democracy but a fierce advocate against the use of forced labor
and child soldiers,” he’s kept her country on a list of nations the U.S. sanctions
for using child soldiers in its military. And his ambassador to the U.N.,
Samantha Power, has spoken movingly in condemnation of the use of child soldiers,
which she’s termed a “scourge,” from Syria and the Central
African Republic to South Sudan.
Only one small problem, as Nick Turse, author of Tomorrow’s
Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, points out in
his latest reportage: the young, desperately divided nation of South Sudan is
something of an American-sponsored creation, its military heavily supported
by Washington, and so its child soldiers – and it has plenty of them – turn
out not to be quite the same sort of scourge they are in Burma, Syria, or elsewhere.
Somehow, they’ve proved to be in the American “national interest” and so, shockingly
enough, as Turse reveals today, were the subjects of a presidential “waiver”
that sets aside Congress’s 2008 Child Soldiers Protection Act. The willingness
of a president to sideline a subject he’s otherwise denounced in no uncertain
terms is worthy of a riddle that might go something like: when is slavery not
slavery? And the answer would be, when it gets in the way of U.S. policy. With
that in mind, let Turse take you deep into South Sudan, where children tote
AK-47s and the sky is not cloudy all day. ~ Tom
The Kids Aren’t All Right
Presidential Waivers, Child Soldiers, and an American-Made Army in Africa
By Nick Turse
MALAKAL, South Sudan – I didn’t really
think he was going to shoot me. There was no anger in his eyes.
His finger may not have been anywhere near the trigger. He didn’t draw
a bead on me. Still, he was a boy and he was holding an AK-47 and it was
pointed in my direction.
It was unnerving.
I don’t know how old he was.
I’d say 16, though maybe he was 18 or 19. But there were a few soldiers
nearby who looked even younger – no more than 15.
When I was their age, I wasn’t trusted to drive, vote, drink, get married,
gamble in a casino, serve on a jury, rent a car, or buy a ticket to an R-rated
movie. It was mandatory for me to be in school. The
law decreed just how many hours I could work and
prohibited my employment in jobs deemed too dangerous for kids – like operating
mixing machines in bakeries or repairing elevators. No one, I can say
with some certainty, would have thought it a good idea to put an automatic weapon
in my hands. But someone thought it was acceptable for them. A lot
of someones actually. Their government – the government of South Sudan
– apparently thought so. And so did mine, the government of the United
States.
Photo Bomb
There was a reason that boy pointed
his weapon my way. A lot of them, in fact. In the most immediate
sense, I brought it upon myself. I was doing something I knew could get
me in trouble, but I just couldn’t help myself.
I tried to take a picture. Okay,
I took a picture. More than one.
Click here to see a larger version
Malakal airfield, July 2014.
Public photography is frequently frowned upon in South Sudan. Take pictures
of the wrong thing and the authorities might force you to delete the images, or confiscate your camera, or maybe worse.
The incident in question took place during last year’s rainy season on the
outskirts of sodden Malakal, a war-ravaged
town 320 miles north of the capital, Juba. The airport, near the banks of
the White Nile, had devolved into an airstrip. Nobody seemed to use its vintage blue and white terminal
building anymore. Instead, you drove past cold-eyed Rwandan peacekeepers, United
Nations troop trucks, and an armored personnel carrier or two, right up to the
tarmac.
That’s where I was when a fairly big,
nondescript white plane arrived. That in itself was hardly remarkable.
It’s de rigueur for Malakal. If it isn’t a World Food Program flight,
then it’s a big-bellied plane hauling in supplies for some non-governmental
organization or a United Nations plane like the one that brought me there and
that I was waiting for to whisk me away.
This nondescript white plane, however,
was different from the others. When the Canadair CRJ-100, with “Cemair” written across its tail, taxied up and its door opened,
it wasn’t your typical array of airline passengers who sallied down the gangway.
At least not at first. It was a large group of young men in camouflage
uniforms carrying assault rifles and machine guns. And they were met on
the runway by scores of similarly attired, similarly armed young men who had
arrived in a convoy just minutes earlier.
I’d never seen anything like it, so
I pulled out my phone and tried to surreptitiously take a few photos.
Not surreptitiously enough, though. A commander spotted me, got angry,
and headed my way, waving his finger “no.” It was then that this boy with
the AK-47, who had arrived in the convoy, turned toward me – following the
officer’s gaze – and the rifle in his arms turned with him, and I stepped lively
to put the commander between me and him, while quickly shoving my phone in my
pocket and apologizing again and again.
Click here to see a larger version
Malakal airfield, July 2014.
Approximately 13,000 children have
been recruited into armed groups in South Sudan, according to the United Nations
Children’s Fund (UNICEF). In addition, about 400,000 youngsters have been
forced out of school due to the civil war that has been flaring and simmering
there for almost a year and a half. How so many children came to be affected
by the conflict and why so many of them find themselves serving in the national
army, the main rebel force, and other militias needs to be explained.
It has much to do with civil wars that started in the 1950s and lasted for the
better part of five decades, pitting rebels in the south against the government
in the north of what was then a single country: Sudan.
Other factors include the 2005 peace
deal that led to an independent South Sudan and transformed a guerrilla force
into a national military, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army or SPLA; a rural
culture in which cows are king because they are currency and young boys are
armed to defend against cattle raids, as well as to conduct them; and an armed
grudge match between political rivals representing different tribal groups in
South Sudan that began in December 2013. Add all of this together and
any tangible recent progress toward ridding South Sudan of the scourge of child
soldiers has been obliterated.
Oh yes, and into that mix you would
also have to factor the United States, a country that, as then U.S. Senator,
now Secretary of State John Kerry put it, helped “midwife” South Sudan into existence.
America’s African Army
In 1996, the United States began funneling military equipment through nearby Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Uganda
to rebels in southern Sudan as they battled for independence. A decade
later, after the civil war ended in a peace deal, Washington officially began
offering military “assistance” to the SPLA, according to State Department documents.
At that point, without fanfare and far from the prying eyes of the press, the
U.S. launched a concerted campaign to transform the SPLA from a guerrilla force
into a professional army.
When I recently asked about the scope
of this training, Rodney Ford, the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs
spokesperson, told me: “The U.S. government began a comprehensive defense professionalization
program which started in [fiscal year] 2006 [and] continued after the referendum
and independence of South Sudan until December 2013. This assistance included
infrastructure, vehicles, human rights training, logistics, administration,
medical, military justice, finance, and English language training among an array
of other military subjects. The U.S. government, for example, conducted
a comprehensive medical program with the South Sudanese military which entailed
procuring mobile field hospitals, building clinics, training nurses and improving
the military’s medical infrastructure.”
Ford also emphasized that no
“lethal equipment” was provided and noted that the lessons were designed to
“give soldiers the tools and skills that would benefit the civilian population.”
It sounded almost like they were building a South Sudanese Peace Corps.
In reality, there was more to it. U.S.
support was not strictly a kumbaya effort of medical clinics and human
rights instruction. It included the training and equipping of the elite
presidential guard; the construction of a new SPLA headquarters in Juba; the
renovation of a training center at the SPLA Command and Staff College in Malou,
a town north of the capital; and the construction of the headquarters of two
SPLA divisions in the towns of Mapel and Duar. Included as well were training
programs for general officers and senior instructors; the deployment of a “training
advisory team” to guide the overhaul of intelligence, communications, and other
key functions; the employment of Kenyan and later Ethiopian instructors to teach
basic military skills to SPLA recruits; the provision of secure voice and data
communications to SPLA general headquarters; the development of riverine forces
and up to 16 tactical watercraft; military police instruction; the training
of commando forces by Ethiopian troops; and the
establishment of a noncommissioned officers academy at Mapel with training from
private contractors and later U.S. military personnel. And according to a comprehensive report focusing
on the years 2006-2010 by Richard Rands for the Small Arms Survey at the Graduate
Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, this list only
encompasses part of Washington’s efforts.
During the early 2000s, as thousands
of refugee “Lost Boys” who had fled the civil war in southern
Sudan began to be resettled in cities across the United States, their brothers and sisters back home
continued to suffer as civilians or as child combatants. Between 2001
and 2006, however, as international pressure mounted and the civil war waned,
some 20,000 child soldiers were also reportedly demobilized by the SPLA, although thousands remained
in the force for a variety of reasons, including an extreme lack of other opportunities.
By 2010, when the SPLA pledged to demobilize all of its child soldiers by the end of the
year, there were an estimated 900 children still serving in the force.
The next year, under terms of the agreement that ended the civil war, the people
of southern Sudan voted for their independence. Six months later, on July
9th, South Sudan became the world’s newest nation, prompting a strong statement of support from President Barack Obama:
“I am confident that the bonds of friendship between South Sudan and the United
States will only deepen in the years to come. As Southern Sudanese undertake
the hard work of building their new country, the United States pledges our partnership
as they seek the security, development, and responsive governance that can fulfill
their aspirations and respect their human rights.”
While child soldiers, in fact, remained in the SPLA, the U.S. nonetheless engaged
in a years-long effort to pour billions of dollars in humanitarian aid, as well
as hundreds of millions of dollars of military and security assistance,
into South Sudan. Here’s the catch in all this: the Child Soldiers Prevention
Act (CSPA), passed by Congress in 2008 and enacted in 2010, prohibits the United
States from providing military assistance to governments using child soldiers.
This means that the Obama administration should have been barred
from providing South Sudan with military assistance in 2011. The government,
however, relied on a technicality to gain an exemption – claiming the list of
barred countries was created before the new nation formally came into existence.
Washington’s support for the SPLA continued
even as militia groups with children under arms were folded into the force. The U.S. flung open
the doors of advanced U.S. military schools, training centers, colleges, and
universities to SPLA personnel. In 2010 and 2011, for example, U.S. taxpayers
footed the bill for some of them to attend U.S. military armor, artillery, intelligence,
and infantry schools; in 2012 and 2013, it was the National Defense University,
the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, the Marine Corps Combat Service
Support School, and the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, California,
among other institutions.
According to the State Department’s 2013 Congressional
Budget Justification, tens of millions of dollars were also earmarked for “refurbishment,
operations, and maintenance of training centers and divisional headquarters;
strategic and operational advisory assistance; unit and individual professional
training; and communications and other non-lethal equipment for the military.”
All of it, according to official State Department documents, was designed to
promote “a military that is professionally trained and led, ethically balanced,
aware of moral imperatives, and able to contribute positively to national and
South-South reconciliation.”
At the same time it was attempting
to transform the SPLA into a national army, the U.S. military began operating
from an outpost in South Sudan’s hinterlands. At a Combined Operations Fusion Center in Nzara, a small contingent of U.S. Special
Operations forces worked with South Sudanese military intelligence as part of
Observant Compass, an operation focused on degrading or destroying Joseph Kony’s
murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Planes and helicopters, flown by private contractors, ferried U.S.
troops in and out of the small camp. It was also used by special ops personnel
for training SPLA forces in everything from navigation skills to airmobile helicopter assaults and as a staging
area for joint raids against the LRA in the Democratic
Republic of Congo. Until just weeks before the civil war broke out in
South Sudan in 2013, U.S. special operators were conducting military assault drills at Nzara.
As the United States was pouring money
and effort into building up the country’s armed forces, human rights groups repeatedly complained about its military’s use of children.
This isn’t to say that the Obama administration turned a blind eye to the practice.
It was, in fact, much worse than that.
On September 28, 2012, for example,
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson issued a strong
statement against the use of children as combatants. “Protecting and assisting
children affected by armed conflict and preventing abuses against them is a
priority for the United States,” he announced. “We remain committed to ending
the unlawful recruitment and use of child soldiers, including in the Democratic
Republic of the Congo (DRC).” Carson went on to note that, adhering to
provisions of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, the U.S. would indeed withhold
certain security assistance to the DRC (though not all of it).
That same day, President Obama issued a statement of his own, waiving the
application of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act with respect to several nations
(as the act indeed allows a president to do). South Sudan was included on the
grounds that such a decision was in “the national interest of the United States.”
It was not, as it happens, in the interest of the children of South Sudan, not
at least according to a senior United Nations official who was not authorized
to speak on the record. The U.S. waiver “was doing more harm than good
because there is absolutely no political will to solve the child soldier problem,”
that official explained to me.
In September 2013, Obama issued still another CSPA waiver – in the
form of a memorandum to Secretary of State Kerry – keeping South Sudan eligible
for U.S. military assistance and the licenses needed to buy military equipment, again citing national
interest.
By the end of the year, South Sudan
had collapsed into civil war with many SPLA soldiers, especially those of the
Dinka tribe, remaining loyal to President Salva Kiir’s government and others,
predominantly of Nuer ethnicity, joining former Vice President Riek Machar’s
rebel forces. Members of the SPLA were almost immediately implicated in mass atrocities, including the killing of Nuer civilians.
That presidential guard, trained and equipped by the U.S. a few years earlier,
was especially singled out for its brutal crimes.
Machar’s opposition forces, including
many Nuers formerly with the SPLA, carried out their own atrocities, including large-scale massacres of Dinka civilians and others.
The State Department soon issued a report, indignant over the fact
that “since the outbreak of conflict on December 15, [2013] there have been
reports of forced conscription by government forces and recruitment and use
of child soldiers by both government and antigovernment forces” – precisely
the behavior the president had told the secretary of state was in the American
national interest just a few months earlier.
The Kids Aren’t All Right
“We worked closely with the SPLA to
make sure the elimination of child soldiers or children associated with the
military was a high priority,” a State Department official explained to me in
a recent email. “Right before the outbreak of the most recent conflict
the U.N. had stated that there were no more ‘child soldiers’ in the South Sudanese
military though some still remained on SPLA barracks cooking and cleaning, etc.”
That’s not quite how the United Nations
actually put it.
Before the civil war erupted, “the
United Nations verified the recruitment and use of
162 children, all boys and mostly between 14 and 17 years of age,” 99 of whom
were with the SPLA, 35 with a militia allied to a commander named David Yau
Yau, 25 associated with the Lou Nuer tribe, and three with South Sudan’s national
police. “Children associated with SPLA were identified in military barracks,
wearing SPLA uniforms as well as undergoing military training in conflict areas,”
according to the Office of the Special Representative
of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. “In addition,
reports of the recruitment and use of 133 children were pending verification
at the time of reporting.”
Since December 2013, the situation
has become far worse. “We have been deeply disappointed to see the progress
South Sudan had achieved toward ending the unlawful recruitment and use of child
soldiers since independence so gravely set back by the conflict that erupted
in December,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman Ned Price told me last
year. “Both government-aligned and rebel forces have recruited and used
child soldiers in the current conflict, and we call on both sides to end this
practice.”
By May 2014, UNICEF estimated that 9,000 children had been recruited
into the armed forces of both sides in the civil war, despite the fact that
under “both international and South Sudanese law, the forcible or voluntary
recruitment of persons under the age of 18, whether as a member of a regular
army or of an informal militia, is prohibited.” Today, that number is
estimated to have grown to 13,000.
About a year ago, Machar’s SPLA-In
Opposition (SPLA-IO) pledged to end the recruitment of child soldiers.
In late June, according to the U.N., Kiir’s government agreed to “restart the implementation of
the Action Plan signed in 2012 to end and prevent the recruitment and use of
children by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.”
There’s little evidence, however, that
this has translated into tangible effects on the ground on either side.
“Despite renewed promises by both government and opposition forces that they
will stop using child soldiers, both sides continue to recruit and use children
in combat,” said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at
Human Rights Watch (HRW), earlier this year. “In Malakal, government forces
are even taking children from right outside the United Nations compound.”
A well-placed source within the United
Nations offered a similar assessment. “Even though the SPLA re-committed
in June of last year, they haven’t released many kids – only a handful,” he
explained. “The SPLA aren’t releasing their kids and there doesn’t seem
to be any incentive to do so.”
Skye Wheeler, an expert on South Sudan
at Human Rights Watch, agrees that the government hasn’t done much. “The
SPLA is entirely aware that at least two former militiamen who are now fighting
with the government and who have both been integrated into the army are using
and recruiting numerous child soldiers but have not made any significant steps
towards punitive action,” she told me recently by email. She added that
she also knows of no significant efforts to curb the recruitment of children
by Machar’s SPLA-IO.
Last fall, U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations Samantha Power chaired a meeting of the U.N. Security Council on children
and armed conflict in which she declared: “Perpetrators have to be held accountable.
Groups that fail to change their behavior must be hit where it hurts.”
A State Department official who refused to be named for this piece was equally
unequivocal when it came to South Sudan. “Since the outbreak of the conflict,
there have been no waivers issued,” he told me in late March, “and we have expressed
our concerns about the recruitment of children by multiple parties in the current
conflict.” But months earlier – just weeks after Power’s pronouncement
and nearly a year after the civil war in South Sudan began – President Obama
had indeed issued another partial waiver allowing continued
support for the country, despite the prohibitions of the Child Soldiers Prevention
Act.
When I asked about this discrepancy,
the State Department backtracked, admitting that the president had “authorized
a partial waiver of the application of the prohibition in section 404(a) of
the CSPA with respect to South Sudan to allow for the provision of PKO assistance,”
citing a provision of the act and referring to PKO, or “peacekeeping,” funding
long used to train and equip the SPLA. In this instance,
the official insisted that “none of the funds relevant to this partial waiver
have been used to provide any direct assistance to the SPLA.”
Andy Burnett, a spokesperson from the
Office of the Special Envoy to Sudan and South Sudan, then went further.
“Just to apologize, the wording on our response back [to you] was
confusing,” he told me. “We were speaking about waivers that had been
done as in the past – related to capacity building and assistance for the SPLA.
This partial waiver was done with a more narrow intent.”
In fact, the way that waiver was issued
did not sit well with some. “We were disappointed that
a partial waiver was put in place last year again without a clear and public
statement by the [U.S. government] that this was purely to allow certain activities
(support to IGAD monitors and anti-LRA activities) and that the government would
not be receiving any significant military support until the abuses, including
use and recruitment of child soldiers, are properly addressed,” HRW’s Skye Wheeler
told me. She was referring to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development’s
Monitoring and Verification Mechanism for South Sudan, set up in January 2014 to support mediation
of the current civil war.
The State Department acknowledged the
absence of such a declaration, but emphasized that the United States had expressed
its “concern” about the issue to Kiir’s government. Asked about South
Sudan’s response to those concerns, Burnett foggily replied that there were
“differences of opinion about the extent to which [recruitment of children by
the SPLA] is happening; arguments that when it’s happening it’s done by the
opposition or other armed groups that are outside of [SPLA] control.”
In other words, after years of copious aid, effort, and waivers, the U.S. can’t
even get the government of South Sudan to acknowledge its wrongdoing when it
comes to recruiting child fighters, let alone halt it.
Toy Guns, Real Guns, and National Interests
The war in South Sudan has been a nightmare
for children. UNICEF estimates that 600,000 have been affected by psychological distress,
235,000 are at risk of severe acute malnutrition this year, and 680 have been
killed. “Mothers are burying their children… the level of slaughter, of
innocent victims, innocent civilians, is simply unacceptable by any standard
whatsoever,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently told South Sudan’s Eye Radio in scolding
remarks. The leaders of South Sudan’s warring parties “Salva Kiir, the
president, and Riek Machar… need to come to their senses,” he said. “They need
to sign an agreement that’s real and they need to stop allowing the people to
be the victims of their power struggle.” On one thing Kerry was adamant:
“We need to have accountability as this goes forward.”
But what about U.S. accountability?
Does the United States, after years of waivers, bear a responsibility for helping
to entrench South Sudan’s practice of using child soldiers? “In and of
itself, it could be perceived as sanctioning the practice, but in the day-to-day
reality of engaging, we were a strong advocate for moving beyond the practices
that had been historically taking place and removing any child soldiers within
the SPLA,” says Andy Burnett. “I’m not saying we deserve full credit,”
he told me, even as he argued that the president’s waivers had led to real progress.
Whatever progress might have been made
before the civil war, as he readily admitted, was soon obliterated. So
was the U.S. training effort in South Sudan a failure? After a wall of
words about the difficulties involved in “creating an accountable and professional
armed force” in the available time, Burnett took some responsibility, even if
he carefully extended the blame to cover America’s partners in the effort.
“Yes, that the international effort to reform the SPLA was not successful in
preventing something like this [the split of the SPLA in the war] is quite obvious,”
he told me. This admission, however, does little for the children toting
arms now and those who will do so in the years ahead as part of what Burnett
calls “a widening problem of child-soldiering,” due to “even more incidences
of recruitment of children by armed groups within this conflict.”
Click here to see a larger version
Young children with toy guns, Tomping Protection of Civilians Site, Juba,
South Sudan, July 2014.
Walking through a camp for internally
displaced persons at a U.N. base in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, one blazing
hot day last summer, I watched a young girl in a bright pink dress and sporting
a huge smile, and a somewhat younger boy in pink shorts and gray sandals chase
each other through the muck. Each of them was holding a tiny, black plastic
pistol and pretending to shoot the other, just the type of game I reveled in
as a boy.
As they raced around me, splattering
mud and laughing, however, I began to wonder if one day just a few years down
the road, she might be pressed into cooking or carrying water for soldiers and
he might find himself with a real weapon thrust into his hands. It’s a
sad fact that, not so many years from now, I might well encounter that young
boy – his toy pistol exchanged for a real assault rifle – on some out-of-the-way
tarmac in the hinterlands of South Sudan. Should that day ever come, I
imagine I’ll feel just as unnerved as I did that morning in Malakal when a boy
soldier turned his weapon in my direction. I’ll then find little comfort
in President Obama’s contention that looking the other way on child soldiers
is in “the national interest of the United States.” And I’m sure I’ll
be just as disturbed that those “interests” – cited by a president who has
his own kids – so easily trumped the interests
of that boy in Malakal and the rest of South Sudan’s children.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of
TomDispatch.com
and a fellow at the Nation Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award and American Book Award winner for his book Kill Anything That Moves, he has
reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa and his pieces have
appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation,
and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy
Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, has just been published. Reporting for this article
was made possible by the generous support of Lannan Foundation and the Investigative
Fund at the Nation Institute.
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Copyright 2015 Nick Turse
Read more by Tom Engelhardt
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