Living rough: Liberian children displaced by war in Cote d'Ivoire
Credit: IRIN
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At every rebel checkpoint it is the same story. A dozen kids gather around the car, some of them carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, one or two shouldering a rocket-propelled grenade launcher; all of them begging for money.
Some play it cool, posing on the sandbags like junior Rambos. Others scuttle around excitedly, searching bundles of luggage as if they hoped to find toys inside. A few metres away, sitting in the shade of a mango tree, the adult fighters look on impassively while the child soldiers, most of them aged between 10 and 15, do their work.
Each of the six rebel checkpoints between the end of the buffer zone guarded by French peacekeeping troops and the western city of Man is manned by children who in any normal country would still be at school. Nobody pays them, so they simply beg or extort money from passing vehicles to survive.
There are about 10 more checkpoints along the 80 km highway from Man to Danane, near the Liberian frontier. And here again it's the same story.
One boy who looks to be no more than 14 comes up to the car window, holding out his right hand. In the left he casually holds an automatic rifle. "Big brother, our pockets are empty," he pleads. "You should leave something to put in our tummy.... Big guy, think of your little brother."
Rebel commanders declined to tell IRIN how many child soldiers had been recruited into their ranks since a failed coup plunged Cote d'Ivoire into civil war in September 2002 and left rebel forces controlling the north of the country.
"Give us time to set up a unit to identify the children before you ask us how many of them there are," said Dely Gaspard, the military commander of the rebel Patriotic Movement of Cote d'Ivoire (MPCI) in Man, the main town in Cote d'Ivoire's far west, also controlled by rebels.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) would like to take the guns away from the child soldiers and put most of them back into school. But with tension rising and a ten-month-old peace process running into the sand, rebel commanders are not prepared to let go of all their junior fighters just yet.
UNICEF has set up three centres for demobilised child soldiers - two for boys and one for girls - in Bouake, about 380 km north of Abidjan. UNICEF also has four "open centres" in the rebel capital, where the children receive food plus guidance aimed at facilitating their return to civilian life, but do not spend the night.
UNICEF 's representative in Man, Francis Zacko, said it was now up to the authorities in the rebel-held town to designate centres where disarmed child soldiers could be accommodated.
The situation of child fighters from Liberia who drifted across the border with gangs of Liberian and Sierra Leonean mercenaries that fought with the rebels in western Cote d'Ivoire is more complicated.
Most of the Liberian mercenaries were sent home in May, but they left behind a group of 21 child soldiers in Man. These were disarmed by the Ivorian rebels and lived in shacks around the town's empty and deserted prison. Its cells were unlocked and its prisoners were released by the rebels long ago.
Most of these Liberian child soldiers were aged between 13 and 16.
One of them, who gave his name as "AB," told IRIN that he abandoned school in Nimba county in northern Liberia last year and crossed the border before the war started in Cote d'Ivoire to learn to be a driver. When rebel forces seized control of the west shortly afterwards, they thrust a gun into his hands and told him to fight.
AB didn't think twice.
"They gave me a gun and I followed after them without even knowing how to fire it," he told IRIN.
He was forced to learn soon enough. For AB war was not just a case of extorting small change from passers-by at sleepy checkpoints. It was real fighting. The 16-year-old lifted up his T-shirt to show a scar where in one battle a bullet had ricocheted off a nearby wall into his belly.
Some of his friends had fingers and toes missing as a result of injuries sustained in combat. All of them hung around, with little to eat, molested by mosquitoes that breed in nearby puddles, waiting for the world to come to their rescue.
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