English Component

The development of war seems tragic enough, but what do you do when you have no soldiers to fight? In Sierra Leone, during the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) began a civil war to overthrow the government. These soldiers captured diamond mines and villages. They would torture by cutting arms off, and killing thousands of people. The government of Sierra Leone began to fight back pushing the RUF away from the capital of Freetown. Yet, the generals managed to do this by putting children in the front lines of war. These children became victims of their exerted violence. The psychological damage was tremendous, due to the things that they had seen at such a young age. Ishmael told us his story of being a young soldier. He clearly described his experience from running away from the war, to participating in the war, to going to a rehabilitation center in which he learned about his new life as a boy. Child soldiers tend to have an aggressive behavior, due to the fact that they had held a gun beside them since they have been very young, keeping a gun to their side for a very long time. It seems impossible to believe that children can be active participants in the killing of man. Though, it is not them who are responsible for that terrible decision. It is the circumstance that they find themselves in and influence from others; I would like to describe these people as "brain-washers". Some children, like Ishmael, managed to start over and recover their life. Others returned to the front lines to fight. War is known as a contest, in which the big price will be power. The big price for children to participate in war is exposure to violence at an early age, and the complete loss of their childhood.