The woman ran toward me, shouting and waving her arms, tears running down her face. It was a freezing November morning, and I was in a refugee camp in Turanj, a small, bombed-out town on the border between Bosnia and Croatia. A moment later, the woman shouted out what sounded like some kind of curse and then suddenly collapsed as if in a dead faint.

I could not understand what I had done to inspire such a reaction. A Polish United Nations soldier, who understood Serbo-Croatian, stepped forward and explained that the woman had not been raging at me but had been desperately seeking the help of the only journalist to have shown her face in the camp in days.

The previous night, soldiers from the forces of Fikret Abdic had come to the camp in search of new recruits. Abdic was a Bosnian businessman and warlord who, though a Muslim, had broken with the government in Sarajevo and was fighting a war within a war against it in northwest Bosnia. The fight was not going well, and he needed all the fighters he could get.

The woman had already sacrificed for Abdic’s dubious cause. Both her husband and her two elder sons had been killed during the fighting in the previous several months. Now the fighters had taken her youngest boy. They had seized him and thrown him in a van treacherously marked with red
crosses. He was only fourteen.

Occurrences like this took place all the time during the Bosnian War and are taking place in conflicts that are still going on all over the world. While the employment of children is anything but a recent phenomenon—for millennia, children have gone to war as drummer boys, messengers, porters, and servants—the escalating number of children bearing arms in contemporary conflicts is terrifying. Graca Machel, author of the United Nations Report on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, has estimated that in 1995 and 1996 alone, 250,000 children were serving either in government armies or in opposition forces. She has called the participation of child soldiers in war “one of the most alarming trends in armed conflicts.”

The two Additional Protocols of 1977, applying to international and internal armed conflicts respectively, impose on the parties to a conflict the obligation “to take all feasible measures in order that children who have not attained the age of fifteen years do not take a direct part in hostilities” and to “refrain from recruiting them into their armed forces.” The 1998 Rome Statute for an International Criminal Court lists as a war crime conscription or enlistment of children under the age of fifteen into a State’s armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.

Human rights law also addresses the issue of children in armed conflict. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which has gained nearly universal acceptance—the holdouts are Oman, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States—is the primary instrument. The convention defines a child as a person below the age of eighteen, but sets fifteen as a minimum age for going to war. Some States want to set eighteen as the minimum age for combatants, but the proposal has not received wide support, least of all from those countries affected by internal conflicts of the sort most likely to see the use of child soldiers. In such countries, particularly in Africa, typically half of the population is under the age of fifteen.

(See perfidy and treachery.)