Former child soldiers want education

Most of the 2,800 former child soldiers who have turned over their weapons and demobilised during Liberia's current disarmament exercise, tell the carers appointed to look after them that they want education to help them to rebuild their future. However, there are not enough operational schools to absorb them. Most of these youngsters now live in interim care centres operated by child protection agencies, waiting for the authorities to offer them a new future. But many of them are getting impatient. "They told us to give our guns and we will go to school, but we are not sensing anything like that yet. Giving us clothes, food and medicines are not all we need,” 14-year-old David Smith, who fought for former president Charles Taylor, told IRIN. Smith dropped out of primary school and picked up a gun in 1999, when he was only nine years old, but now he is keen to resume his studies. "I still want to learn something in school to become a good person in society," he told IRIN. Since the start of a UN disarmament exercise, which got fully under way in April, 46,000 combatants have disarmed at four cantonments centres across the country. According to the United National Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 2,800 of these fighters are children under the age of 18. Most are boys, but the child soldiers include some girls and teenage mothers. Earlier this month, relief workers caring for former child soldiers said many were being forced to stay in interim care centres for longer than the maximum recommended period of 12 weeks. Many were too scared to go back to their home communities, where no facilities existed to help reintegrate them into ordinary life. The former child combatants are therefore being housed in special care centres, of which there are five around the capital, Monrovia. There, they are fed and receive medical care and attend basic literacy classes. The two main centres in Monrovia are both operated by Don Bosco Homes of the Roman Catholic Church. Several of the former child soldiers there told IRIN about their hopes for the future. They told IRIN they were well fed and comfortable, but still discontented. Several made the point that they did not hand in their weapons simply to stay in these temporary holding centres forever. If it’s not more education that they want, then it’s vocational training that they’re after. "As for me, I dropped out of school while in the fourth Grade, not due to war, but because my parents never had the means of sending me to school," said 16-year-old Marilyn Taylor, who spent three years fighting for the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel group. "I am a woman. Learning a vocation like tailoring would help a whole lot to sustain me," she said. Eating a locally popular dish of rice and cassava leaf stew, 10-year-old Sam Somah told IRIN that he did not want to be reminded of war any more. "If we go to school, interacting with our friends in class, we will not think of war because we will be concentrating our lessons," he said. Don Bosco Homes and Save the Children UK are among the few international charities catering to help Liberia's former child soldiers. Officials from both organisations said that formal education and skills training were the main concerns of the demobilised children they had encountered so far. "The general consensus among the children is a desire to go back to school. But community-based structures, such as the schools needed to absorb them after leaving the centres are mostly destroyed and require urgent renovation," explained Allen Lincoln, the head of Don Bosco Homes in Liberia. "For the time being, Don Bosco has managed to place 43 children formerly associated with fighting back in schools in Monrovia. Those were some of the children who disarmed back in December when the disarmament programme first started," Lincoln said. UNMIL originally launched its demobilisation programme in December, but it was forced to suspend the programme after just 10 days following riots by militiamen demanding cash payment for handing in their guns. These disturbances highlighted the peacekeepers' lack of preparation to run a smooth operation at the time. The disarmament programme was then put on ice until mid-April. Christine McComnick, a disarmament advisor to the British charity group, Save the Children in Liberia, pointed out that even though most former child soldiers were not yet able to go a proper school, they were at least getting a basic grounding in literacy skills whilst at the interim care centres. "We do this not to make them idle while in our centres. We also provide them with psycho-social counselling that helps in shifting their minds from the horrifying war days to seeing themselves as being important and part of the society," she said. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is preparing an Accelerated Learning Programme for children who had been out of school too long to re-enter the classroom with other kids of their own age. This should be particularly relevant to former child soldiers. "The children will go through the Accelerated Learning Program for a period of three years where they will be taught basic literacy,” said UNICEF-Liberia Child Protection Officer Fatuma Ibrahim. According to Ibrahim, UNICEF’s own assessments show that most of the former child soldiers are more interested in skills training than classroom education. "A lot of the children want to do skills such as masonry, carpentry, tailoring, plumbing and predominantly farming. We provide the means whereby they would be supported to acquire the skills training in six months and thereafter be placed in apprenticeships,” Ibrahim told IRIN. She said UNICEF would support former child soldiers who still want to enrol at ordinary schools, but only by supplying educational supplies such as copybooks and reading materials. "There has been a lot of dialogue with school authorities on having these children admitted into their respective institutions during the next academic year," she added. Liberia's academic calendar runs from October to June. However, many of the former child soldiers who spoke to IRIN said they needed free education to go back to school, not just pens and pencils. "Right now, we do not have money and education we heard is very expensive in Monrovia. Most of our parents or relatives do not have money to pay or tuition either," complained 17-year-old Daniel Togba. An official of Liberia's education ministry, who declined to be named, told IRIN that state schools have agreed allow former child soldiers to enrol free of charge. However, most of the schools outside Monrovia still lie in ruins after 14 years of civil war and most private schools still demand fees. "There is no firm commitment from the private school authorities for free education for ex-combatants,” the official said.