Beyond the brutality of the military against protesting monks, and belying the bluster of senior army officers during their grand parades in the new martial capital at their jungle redoubt in Naypyidaw, is a reality that Burma’s ruling State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) does its best to conceal: many of its soldiers are mere children.
Human Rights Watch research this summer showed that boys as young as 10 continue to be forcibly enlisted into Burma’s army by a network of predatory recruiters, often soldiers themselves, who lurk at train stations and outside cinemas and tea shops looking for vulnerable young males to coerce into the Burmese military, or Tatmadaw.
Once forced into the army they are not permitted to contact their families, their ages are fabricated on enlistment material, and they receive harsh training before being deployed to bleak and dangerous outposts throughout Burma’s hinterland.
Boys are used to fight ethnic insurgents, mete out punishment to civilians, and as porters to support frontline troops. One young soldier I interviewed expressed the terror of his first experience of combat. When he tried to run away, his officer threatened to shoot him. He was 13. It is hard to imagine the psychological trauma and damage these experiences are inflicting on children.
The problem of child soldiers is hidden from the eyes of many international observers and Burmese citizens in towns and cities. Child soldiering usually takes place in the conflict zones of the borderlands where they are deployed. Once impressed into the army, child soldiers often eke out a desperate existence fishing and hunting for food and stealing from villagers, surrounded by malarial forests, landmines and ethnic insurgents.
Their plight is so desperate that many of their victims I have spoken to express their pity for them, despite the fact that these boys belong to an army which burns ethnic civilian villages, destroys their crops, and forces them into hiding or across borders as refugees in counterinsurgency campaigns almost medieval in their plodding atrocities.
Despite strong official regulations within the Tatmadaw prohibiting the use of child soldiers and frequent promises to the United Nations that the SPDC is serious about curbing the practice, former child soldiers Human Rights Watch interviewed testified that the practice remains rampant. It is almost impossible to place a figure on how many children under 18 are in the Tatmadaw, but there are certainly thousands.
It hasn’t always been this way. Before 1988, Burma’s army of 180,000 soldiers was a battle hardened and largely professional organization. The Tatmadaw fought large-scale conventional wars and brutal counter-insurgency operations against Communist and ethnic insurgents who were well armed and motivated. Almost all the soldiers and officers were volunteers, and child soldiers were rare. They were common, however, in ethnic opposition forces, and over 30 non-state armed groups in Burma still use children in combat.
Since 1988, when the army put down mass street protests, a major expansion of the armed forces has seen the military grow to an estimated 400,000 or more personnel, many of them children. Large arms purchases in the past 19 years — ships, planes and helicopters from China, tanks and fighter planes from Russia and the Ukraine, artillery pieces from India — all need soldiers to use them. Nevertheless, many army battalions are seriously under strength, with operational numbers of 200 soldiers, far below the optimum level of 800 personnel.
Internal army documents seen by Human Rights Watch point to high levels of desertions and seriously low morale due to poor living conditions and abuses by senior NCOs and officers against the ranks. Children are swept up in the need to replenish the ranks.
Recruitment of minors into the military mirrors Burma’s deteriorating social and economic conditions. Unemployment is high, corruption is endemic, poverty is the norm, and inflation, raging at over 30 percent, places even basic food items beyond the reach of many people.
It is this desperation that feeds the mercenary behavior of recruiters, who prey on large pools of destitute and vulnerable men and boys who are easy prey for press-ganged labor. While the world rightly watches political developments in Burma in the aftermath of the brutal repression of street protesters in September and October, governments such as the United Kingdom and other Security Council members should act at their upcoming meeting on child soldiers to protect a generation of boys from the rapacious Tatmadaw.
The place to start is an arms embargo and financial sanctions that will starve the military of the hardware and funds it needs to keep plundering Burma’s most important treasure, its children.
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