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Children in armed conflict are influencers, not merely affected!
In her paper, Helen Berents (2019) 1 discussed an important issue related to child survivors of armed conflicts; who recorded their memories (their daily experiences, their visions of violence, horror, murder, etc.) about war in narrative texts; whether they were victims whose rights were violated, or recruits who violated the rights of other children and adults, through their forced or voluntary joining of armed groups.
The paper criticized the approach that deals with children as passive victims, i.e., unable to make decisions or express their opinions. They are also considered criminals for forcing armed groups them to join these groups and commit acts of violence, assault and murder, carry luggage and equipment, clean, and carry out similar non-combatant works, make them classified as being stripped of their childhood!
She also highlighted that the parties concerned with enforcing children’s rights according to the 1989 International Convention on the Rights of the Child and international humanitarian law rooted in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their additional protocols are concerned with two matters: protecting children from violations of their rights in armed conflicts, and supporting them by restoring their rights, caring for them, and treating them if they are subjected to violations. Accordingly, the child is treated as if he does not have sufficient awareness to express himself, make decisions regarding the conflicts he has experienced, and the traumas he has received in armed conflicts؛ although the narrative diaries published for children who have experienced and participated in the traumas of war - even if they wrote them after they reached adulthood - revealed a deep awareness among those children, and an ability to understand the world through a certain angle, and to make the decision to be active in the war; such as the child choosing to be a soldier; to provide for his family, or to protect it, or reacting by committing acts of violence and aggression; to protect other threatened children, or to find a safe or less harmful situation in some way! As well as making the decision to be a rejector, or a fugitive, or to enjoy the simplest possibilities of life available to him! And - in all of this - he seems to have mastered the skills of clinging to life!
In summary, Bernts discussed that autobiographies and memoirs of war and trauma written by children - even after they reached adulthood - about their experiences of armed conflicts in their childhood, and which gained wide popularity and acceptance among adults, represent powerful, profound and influential material in revealing children’s understanding, and interpreting their behaviors, feelings and thoughts; as they are aware of armed conflicts and their threat to their lives and the lives of those with them and around them, and that they have possessed certain capabilities to carry out the actions they narrate; which means - in her view - that their voices are absent in reality among the parties concerned with protecting and supporting them, and are not heard when they narrate the horrors they experienced at the time of their rescue and treatment, given that adults are more aware of their feelings and what is appropriate for their treatment and rehabilitation; therefore, analyzing these writings will help in understanding children’s thinking and their means of adapting to the dangers of armed conflicts in order to survive or cling to the edges of life; which will contribute to improving the directions of official efforts to provide for children’s needs during and after armed conflicts.
This topic seemed to me important and worthy of being a research area in studies of analysis of international humanitarian legal discourse in particular, and pragmatic analytical studies that have the ability to form methodological approaches with legal, literary, psychological, social, strategic, political, etc., which can seriously contribute to the sustainability of developing policies, programs, and initiatives related to protecting, treating, and rehabilitating children in armed conflicts. The experience of the project to reintegrate children formerly associated with armed conflict (KAFAK), Launched by the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center in Ma'rib Governorate on September 9, 2017, the (KAFAC) project aims to "rehabilitate a number of recruited children and those affected by the armed conflict in Yemen, by integrating them into society, enrolling them in schools and following up on them, in addition to rehabilitating them psychologically and socially, and preparing courses in this regard for them and their families; so that they can live their normal lives as children... The project also aims to educate parents of children about the dangers of recruitment for this category, and to work on creating a healthy family environment by holding awareness and educational courses and introducing the laws that criminalize the recruitment of children." The number of direct beneficiaries of children since the beginning of the project has reached (530) recruited children. As for the number of indirect beneficiaries from their parents, it has reached (60,560) people since the beginning of the project (https://ksrelief.org/Programs/Child). in the Republic of Yemen, which is funded by the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center, represents a reliable and rich material for study, analysis, and establishing effective policies, initiatives, and strategies, for the following reasons:
Ensuring the integrity of the project and the entity implementing it, as its main goal is to reintegrate the child previously associated with armed conflict into society, without any other goals that contradict with the child’s right to maintain his beliefs, culture, and affiliation; that is, to maintain his original identity.
Ensuring that children formerly associated with armed conflict are immune from being judged, labelled or criminalized, thus helping to document more of their stories of war and armed conflict traumas, along with their own analyses, interpretations and visions.
Ensuring the reliability of the stories of children previously associated with armed conflict, kept in special records, that guarantee the privacy of children, and reflect the child’s own experience, his own awareness, and his own choices, without adult interference in his vision and narration of his experience of the traumas of war and armed conflict.
Ensure that trends in response among children formerly associated with armed conflict are monitored in policies, initiatives and strategies, particularly the extent to which eligible children are committed to not tempting their peers to engage in their experiences and not relapse into armed conflict.
Maintaining the commitment of researchers and analysts to scientific ethics, contributing to the development of a system for protecting children’s rights in armed conflicts, supporting them, rehabilitating them, and reintegrating them into society as contributing members of national development.
To make this research area a success, a central unit can be allocated within the Standing Committee on International Humanitarian Law in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; it designs the strategic plan for this project, supervises its implementation, coordinates the beneficiary relations, organizes their achievements, and the methods of benefiting from them on the widest and most modern scale.
1 Helen Berents: Australian Research Council Discovery Award for Young Researchers (DECRA) Fellow and Associate Professor at the Institute of Justice, Faculty of Law, University of Queensland, Australia.
References
Berents, H. (2019). "This is my story": Children's war memoirs and challenging Protectionist discourses. International Review of the Red Cross (Children and war) 101(911), 459-479. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1816383120000120
