Mali Islamists pay parents to recruit child soldiers
MOPTI, MALI Salif Haidara sat drinking tea on the side of the road with other weary bus passengers when a man with a turban and a long beard approached them: Did they want to become holy warriors?
The skinny teen had left his poor hometown in the desert with only the yellow tank top, pants and plastic flip-flops he was wearing. Now Salif was being told he could earn $30 a day for himself and $400 a month for his family — an enormous sum for a boy who had just turned 16.
The car was waiting to take recruits to a two-week training camp in Mali’s desert, where they would learn how to fire weapons. But the man named Omar made one thing clear.
“Once you’ve taken the money and eaten, it’s a done deal,” recalled Salif, his troubled face still free of stubble after four days and nights on the bus. “You’re there until you die or the war is over.”
Across northern Mali, Islamists have plucked and paid for as many as 1,000 children from rural towns and villages devastated by poverty and hunger, revealed in several dozen interviews with residents, human rights officials, four children or youths and an Islamist official. Children with machine-guns half their size stroll down the streets in Timbuktu, where Westerners can no longer go because of the threat of kidnapping.
The interviews shed new light on the recruitment practices of the Islamists, including first-hand accounts of how much money is being offered to poor youth and their families to join. They also provide evidence that a new generation in what was long a moderate Muslim nation is becoming radicalized, as the Islamists gather forces to fight a potential military intervention backed by the United Nations.
“We need to intervene rapidly to discourage these people,” said Amadou Bocar Teguete, the vice-president of Mali’s national Human Rights Commission. “The children are innocent and don’t know what they are doing, and then they are transformed into criminals.”
Human Rights Watch says child soldiers are fighting in at least 14 other countries worldwide. Mali, however, was a stable democracy until this year’s coup and experts say the recruitment and religious indoctrination of child soldiers here marks a new and ominous development.
Child soldiers are being used by all the armed groups operating in northern Mali, but the Islamists, including a militant group known as Ansar Dine, have been among the most prominent recruiters, say residents and rights groups.
The UN children’s agency said it has been able to corroborate at least 175 reported cases of child soldiers in northern Mali this year, with parents receiving between $1,000 and $1,200 per child. However, Mali’s human rights commission branch in Timbuktu said some families have reportedly received as much as $2,000. Salif suggests some families are promised quite a bit more at $4,800 a year, more than four times the average annual income per person in Mali.
Mali human rights officials also put the total number of children recruited by the Islamists considerably higher than UN estimates at 1,000, based on accounts from the major cities of Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal. Officials said at least 200 child soldiers are operating in Mali’s town of Timbuktu alone.
Since a military coup in March that overthrew the country’s democratically elected president, Islamists have taken over the north, and nearly half a million people have fled. Many of those who stayed lack the means to leave, and are especially susceptible to cash or in-kind donations.
“The Islamists are distributing money and food to their parents, so the children have no choice,” said El Boukhari Ben Essayouti, secretary-general with the Malian Human Rights Association. “Poverty and misery that are pushing these children toward them.”
The practice also takes advantage of a long tradition in western Africa, where parents in rural areas send their children away to the distant cities for an Islamic education, particularly if they have no money to pay for school fees or meals.
In the dusty and remote village of Goundam, dotted with mud homes, at least two children under 18 were conscripted into the Ansar Dine militant group back in August. The boys are no longer in contact with their parents, said the deputy mayor of the town of about 13,000 near Timbuktu.
The children stay at camps with the militants on the outskirts of towns. Sadou Diallo, mayor of Gao, said members of al- Qaida’s North Africa branch, known as AQIM, are giving them military training and religious indoctrination.