Poster Child Soldiers

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Former child soldiers in southern Sudan are failing to settle back into their communities and instead are picking up guns to fight again, a U.N. official said on Thursday. Radhika Coomaraswamy of Sri Lanka, the special envoy for children and armed conflict, visited Sudan late last month.

"We met a lot of young people, orphans and all, and many of them want to get back into the fighting," Coomaraswamy told a news conference. "They want to get back into the armed forces because they are used to carrying a gun, they have social status with a gun and they just can't get back into their communities."

A report on Monday by British-based Save the Children accused Sudanese government forces of recruiting children as young as 8 in the South of the country, while over 8,000 children were still being used in rebel and militia groups across West Africa.

---- Reminds me of a child soldier I met many years ago. The boy, in uniform carrying a rifle and sidearm, stopped me on a street corner to check documents. For a brief second I thought it was a joke, a boy playing with his dad's military things; his head barely reached my shoulder and I'm 5 feet 3 inches barefoot. I produced my documents.

To make a long story short he was 10, with a mother and siblings. He joined for a monthly ration of 12 pounds of rice and beans, cuajada cheese, and pinolillo powder. A guns for butter childhood (few children have "a childhood" in third world countries).

He had been forced into child soldiering by evil men creating evil circumstances. And in his particular situation, circumstances made and funded in the USA.

Probably the same folks raised funds and condemned child soldiering since Stephen of Cloyes (white children are called by God to soldiering, brown children soldiering are a fundraiser's poster child.) Tell me again who's arming the world's armies. Tell me again how the Western world is more civilized today.

I found the boy soldier, years after the war, he was still shorter than me and still in uniform. Not that he was in love with army life or felt it gave him status, but his country is still the 2nd poorest in the hemisphere and employment is either tourism or sweatshop industry - with too many laborers for too few jobs – he has a wife and children to feed. Army pay is better now he says. A guns for butter manhood.

The generous US social welfare system (compared to zero in other areas of the world) is all that prevents millions of Americans from the same raw existence. But I don't think that's a long stretch; the way the government is currently looting, we'll get there.