Volume 52, Number 19 · December 1, 2005
The Warrior Children
By Caroline Moorehead
Children at War
by P.W. Singer
Pantheon, 269 pp., $25.00
They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan
by Alephonsion Deng, Benson Deng, and Benjamin Ajak
Public Affairs, 311 pp., $25.00
The Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience
by Mark Bixler
University of Georgia Press, 261 pp., $24.95
It was in the early 1990s that Cornelio Sommaruga, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, began talking about the new kind of warfare his delegates were witnessing, one in which there was no respect for either the laws of war or the sign of the Red Cross, no clear lines of command, and in which civilians, rather than enemy soldiers, were targets for marauding bands of killers, often in fanciful uniforms and heavily drugged. Rwanda, where neighbors hacked each other to death with machetes, happened soon after, and Srebrenica, where eight thousand Muslim men were led away under the eyes of UN peacekeepers and murdered, and Sierra Leone, in which villagers thought to be sympathetic to the government had their hands and arms chopped off by rebel troops. In this new kind of war, said Sommaruga, everyone and everything—babies, crops, livestock, houses, old people—had become fair game. Graça Machel, in Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, her report to the UN in 1996 on children and war, spoke of the 'desolate moral vacuum' left by protracted states of disorders, fueled not by governments but by warlords and insurgents.
Review, 2754 words
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