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President Obama couldn’t have been more eloquent. Addressing the Clinton Global Initiative, for instance, he 说过: “When a little boy is kidnapped, turned into a child soldier, forced to kill or be killed — that’s slavery.” Denouncing Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and offering aid to Uganda and its neighbors in tracking Kony down, he 说过, “It’s part of our regional strategy to end the scourge that is the LRA and help realize a future where no African child is stolen from their family, and no girl is raped, and no boy is turned into a child soldier.” In support of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi, whom he has lauded as “not only a great champion of democracy but a fierce advocate against the use of forced labor and child soldiers,” he’s kept her country on a list of nations the U.S. sanctions for using child soldiers in its military. And his ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, has spoken movingly in condemnation of the use of child soldiers, which she’s 被称为 a “scourge,” from Syria and the Central African Republic to South Sudan.
Only one small problem, as Nick Turse, author of 明天的战场：美国代理战和非洲的秘密行动, points out in his latest reportage: the young, desperately divided nation of South Sudan is something of an American-sponsored creation, its military heavily supported by Washington, and so its child soldiers — and it has plenty of them — turn out not to be quite the same sort of scourge they are in Burma, Syria, or elsewhere. Somehow, they’ve proved to be in the American “national interest” and so, shockingly enough, as Turse reveals today, were the subjects of a presidential “waiver” that sets aside Congress’s 2008 Child Soldiers Protection Act. The willingness of a president to sideline a subject he’s otherwise denounced in no uncertain terms is worthy of a riddle that might go something like: when is slavery not slavery? And the answer would be, when it gets in the way of U.S. policy. With that in mind, let Turse take you deep into South Sudan, where children tote AK-47s and the sky is not cloudy all day.
- 孩子们不太好
总统弃权，儿童兵和非洲美军
Nick Turse•17年2015月4,300日•XNUMX个单词
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I’ve never quite understood the angst over “child soldiers.” One might want to forbid the use of chemical weapons because they are very 有效 against unprotected populations. But if “child soldiers” were 有效, they’d already be in widespread use. There’s a reason that most armies wait until young men are at least 17 before allowing enlistment and it isn’t humanitarianism. Child soldiers are a measure of desperation; Nazi Germany started going as low as 14 year olds only in the very last stages of World War II. Forbidding a practice of desperation strikes me as pointless, although I guess that it’s useful posturing.
儿童兵并不一定代表绝望。正如对该问题的研究表明，它们有时是，但有时它们是首选士兵，因为它们具有成本效益。例如，参见斯科特·盖茨 (Scott Gates) 所著、西蒙·赖克 (Simon Reich) 编辑的《破碎国家时代的儿童士兵》一书。非洲通常被认为是此类士兵的主要使用者，但远在哥伦比亚，哥伦比亚革命武装力量游击队却强迫他们服役。
他们的报酬很少（如果有的话），更容易被胁迫执行主人的命令，并且可以在不太困难的情况或反对派中提供一定的军事能力。例如，保卫城镇免受轻武装的成年民兵的袭击对于儿童兵来说非常有效，他们可以在建筑物中避难，并根据需要移动和开火。武装它们不是问题，因为自冷战结束以来，世界上充斥着廉价的小型武器。此外，当与成年士兵一起作战时，他们的效率会成倍增加。第一个在阿富汗阵亡的美国士兵是一名绿色贝雷帽士兵，被一名 14 岁的狙击手射杀。
目前世界上 40% 的武装部队、反叛团体和恐怖组织都有儿童服役，而且除南极洲以外的各大洲都有儿童服役，这是对人类现状的悲惨反思。