Paris – When his mother, father and two brothers were killed in Sierra Leone’s civil war in the 1990s, 13-year-old Ishmael Beah turned to the only place he knew for comfort: an armed faction.
“One minute I had a family and the next, I didn’t have anyone,” said Beah, who managed to escape his life as a child soldier – unlike thousands of others.
What remains now mostly are scars of living through such violence.
“Taking a gun and shooting someone was as easy as drinking a glass of water,” Beah, now 26, told participants at a conference in Paris on Monday on rehabilitating child soldiers and singling out nations where they are recruited.
The United Nations estimates that about 250,000 children younger than 18 are involved in about a dozen conflicts around the world. Often they are used not only as fighters, but as messengers, spies and porters and to provide sexual services.
Like many underage fighters, Beah said he was “looking for safety and was recruited because of that.” After serving in an armed group for two years, Beah went through a rehabilitation program in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown.
“No one is born violent. No child in Africa, Latin America or Asia wants to be part of war,” said Beah, who lives in New York City and has written a forthcoming memoir about his experiences.
Representatives of at least 58 countries and a host of nongovernmental organizations joined the two-day conference, sponsored by UNICEF and France’s Foreign Ministry, to develop strategies to prevent the recruitment of children and reintegrate former child soldiers into society.
They are “lost children, lost for peace and lost for the development of their countries,” said French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy. “It is essential to prove to these children, these young people, that another life is possible.”
The Paris conference is also aiming to help girls, who account for nearly 40 percent of recruits in certain armed groups and are particularly vulnerable to sexual abuses, organizers said.
“The girl child is often forced to play multiple roles in the conflict: She is often sex slave, mother and combatant at the same time,” said Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. special representative for children and armed conflicts.
Girls are frequently rejected by their families and have an especially hard time after conflicts end.
