(New York, March 31, 2005) — The government of Côte d’Ivoire has recruited hundreds of recently demobilized combatants in Liberia, including scores of children under 18, to fight alongside Ivorian government forces, Human Rights Watch said today.
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The Ivorian government is talking peace while actively preparing for war using foreign combatants, including demobilized child soldiers from Liberia.
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Child soldiers who had been demobilized after Liberia’s brutal civil war, ex-commanders and community leaders told Human Rights Watch that children have been crossing into Côte d’Ivoire since October to fight with a pro-government militia based around the western cocoa-belt town of Guiglo.
“The Ivorian government is talking peace while actively preparing for war using foreign combatants, including demobilized child soldiers from Liberia,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director Human Rights Watch. “These children endured a horrendous civil war in Liberia. Now they’re being manipulated into taking up arms again in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire.”
On April 3, South African President Thabo Mbeki will meet with the parties to the Ivorian conflict in Pretoria as part of an African Union-led peace initiative. “Mbeki needs to urge all parties to stop recruiting or using children for use in the Ivorian conflict,” Takirambudde said.
The Liberian and Ivorian governments must prosecute those involved in the recruitment and use of child soldiers. Human Rights Watch also called on the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who announced on January 20 that he would send a team to Côte d’Ivoire to lay the groundwork for a possible investigation of war crimes, to include the recruitment and use of child soldiers in the ICC’s investigation. Under the statute of the International Criminal Court, the recruitment and use of children under the age of 15 is a war crime.
In mid-March, Human Rights Watch interviewed 13 Liberian ex-combatants, including four mid-level commanders and eight children, who consistently identified two Ivorian military officers—one colonel and one sergeant—whom they said coordinated the recruitment of Liberian recruits on behalf of the Ivorian government.
The interviewees said they were offered financial compensation for going to fight in Côte d’Ivoire and indeed were offered money for each additional “recruit” they brought with them. They said money was paid to them by Ivorian army officers once they arrived to the Lima bases, and usually after their “recruit” had spent some time with the militia. Others were offered clothing, jobs and lured by the opportunity of ‘paying themselves’ through looting.
The interviewees described crossing the border into Côte d’Ivoire in small groups, sometimes accompanied by the Ivorian military sergeant, and once in Côte d’Ivoire, being housed in one of several bases in and around the western towns of Guiglo, Bloléquin and Toulepleu. Most identified the group for which they were fighting in Côte d’Ivoire as the ‘Lima Militia’ and said it is comprised primarily of Liberians who during the recently ended Liberian war fought with the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL).
“I left Liberia to go fight in Côte d’Ivoire in November 2004 and fought for a full week,” said a 15-year-old Liberian boy told Human Rights Watch. “My commander and I just came back a few days ago. We came to recruit more boys and take them back for our operation.”
While in the bases, they described receiving uniforms, weapons, logistics and training from Ivorian military personnel. All of them described seeing tens of Liberian children—some recruited from inside Liberia and others who they said had been recruited from villages and refugee camps in Côte d’Ivoire—inside each of the militia bases.
Most of the Liberians interviewed had disarmed in Liberia last year and subsequently signed up for education or skills training programs being administered by the U.N.-backed Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) Program. But due to severe funding shortfalls in this program, only a few education and skills-training programs have opened up in regions along the Ivorian border.
All combatants interviewed said they did not understand why the programs and schools had yet to open and cited their frustration as having contributed to their decision to join the Ivorian militia. The commanders appeared to have exploited this and used it as a tactic to encourage ex-combatants to fight in Côte d’Ivoire.