Today, Thomas Lubanga was found guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-17364988). Over the past weeks, mass media and social networking tools have brought to the fore awareness of Joseph Kony's similar crimes (check out Sverker Finnström's comment on the Kony viral video: http://www.e-ir.info/2012/03/15/kony-2012-and-the-magic-of-international-relations/). Both men have forcibly stolen children from communities, brutalized them in order to isolate them, and then forced them to commit horrific acts such as murder and rape. But what of these children and youth after they return to civil communities?
I think that the communities and children who are left with the legacy of violence and brutality will face a challenge in living with and among each other. I think there is a role for traditional reconciliation practices to re-weave the fabric of communities, but it is not an easy task. Families and communities will have to deal with youth they no longer know. They will have to deal with feelings of helplessness, shame, horror, guilt and compassion towards those they had lost, but who have come back. The children and youth will face confusion about their own moral accountability and agency, and their newly discovered capacity to perpetrate violence and atrocity on others. What will work for these children and communities?
About a month ago I heard a presentation by Dr. Kirsten Fisher (http://helsinki.academia.edu/KirstenFisher) a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. Her most recent work focuses on individual agents of atrocity for whom responsibility is difficult to ascertain. In fact, her presentation was on the situation of child soldiers who are returned to civil society after their part in the atrocities has concluded. I found Dr. Fisher's presentation interesting for many reasons. She discussed the ambiguous status of children and youth who were seen as victims by their home community members, but who were at the same time viewed with distrust. In other words, though there was a desire to 'forget' about their past and embrace them in the community as children, it was not really possible to forget the horrific, non-childish acts that they had perpetrated, and that fact that these young people have been damaged by the brutality they were forced to perpetrate.
Coincidentally, about a year ago I had an interesting discussion with Dr. Sverker Finnström (http://uppsala.academia.edu/SverkerF), a cultural anthropologist who has conducted recurrent fieldwork in war-torn Uganda, with a focus on
how young adults, born into civil war, understand and attempt to control
their moral and material circumstances. In his article "Reconciliation Grown Bitter?: War, Retribution and Ritual Action in Northern Uganda" (chapter 7 of Localizing Transitional Justice: Interventions and Priorities after Mass Violence, ed. Rosalind Shaw and Lars Waldorf, with Pierre Hazan, http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17292) Dr. Finnström talks about the use of customary reconciliation rituals in Uganda to establish functional co-existence in communities, and to 'share a present that is not repetitive'. The ritual for creating reconciliation after an injury or death uses traditional criteria for determining when a child has moral agency within a particular cultural framework. These criteria include the ability to take advice from elders, take responsibility for household maintenance, etc. However, child soldiers are seen as outside this frame of reference. They are children who are 'out of culture' as 'they just don't know what they are doing', according to one Ugandan elder interviewed by Dr. Finnström.
I find Dr. Finnström's study of traditional and local reconciliation practices informative and insightful. I also find Dr. Fisher's line of inquiry around the role of responsibility in promoting re-integration of child soldiers in their own communities to be interesting. I want to know if there is a way to bring these children and youth 'back into culture'. I want to know what you think:
What is needed for communities to take on internal reconciliation with their own children, within a traditional framework? Do they have the capacity already? What more is needed? What support is needed from civil society and the international community?
Is it fair to put the burden on local communities to resolve the harms resulting from a civil or international dispute perpetrated by warlords?
Moral responsibility is taught to children in order to bring them into community norm-building and maintenance. How does a community teach children about the responsibilities of adulthood without first addressing the enormous atrocities that they have been part of?
Does avoiding an examination of the responsibility of child-soldiers increase the possibility of endemic violence in the communities when the children and youth grow up?
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