forced recruitment

By Philip Obaji Jr., The Daily Beast

Generations of young Nigerians in the northeast of their country are being shaped by the terrors of the war.

LAGOS — “I was asked to kill my parents on the day I was captured,” said 16-year-old Babagana, a former Boko Haram child slave. "I had no courage, so they killed them in front of me.”

“That is how Boko Haram operates,” he told me when I saw him in March in Borno State. “They first take out your parents so you have no one else to fall back to.”

In South Sudan, as in many parts of the world engulfed in conflict, youth are growing up in communities that have been torn apart by war. The film The Good Lie, which tells the story of the lost boys and girls of Sudan, vividly portrays their struggles during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). Throughout the war, children were actively conscripted, both voluntarily and by force, into the national army and other armed groups. That legacy of recruiting child soldiers has continued into today’s conflict in South Sudan.

Photo: Vanguardia

Colombia’s army has acknowledged that forcing youths into trucks on the pretext of checking their military status is against the law, newspaper El Espectador reported on Thursday.

In late August, after allegations made ​​in the media about arbitrary raids for recruitment purposes by the Army, better known as “batidas”, the then Head of Army Recruiting General Felix Ivan Muñoz was relieved of his duties. Colonel Mauricio Martinez was confirmed as the replacement and now has the role of promoting “the improvement of processes for defining the military situation of Colombian men.”

This is a recurring issue. The Colombian military has in the past been accused of forced and irregular recruitment of young people and citizens exempt from military service.

These “illegal raids” are carried out in cities where army trucks illegally and forcibly pick up young men on the pretext of checking their military status.

Rafael Uzcátegui

In 1998 lieutenant colonel Hugo Chávez won the presidency of Venezuela, after staging a coup d’etat in 1992. For the first time in Venezuela’s democratic period (which began in 1958), a member of the Armed Forces was elected head of state. One of the consequences was that a new phase of progressive militarisation had begun in the country, initiated with a constitutional reform in 1999, which granted members of the Armed Forces the right to vote, in addition to other political rights, such as the right to be elected to public office in a public vote. Today, soldiers occupy different offices, such as ministers, governors, and mayors. Although there is a coalition of political parties that supports president Chávez, the Gran Polo Patriótico, there is a lot of evidence that shows that, in fact, the Armed Forces are Hugo Chávez's political organisation of trust to exercise political power.