Slavery - the sadistic trade

A six-year-old boy’s parents were killed, he was taken away, beaten if he didn’t speak Arabic, forced to tend cattle and only given scraps of food. “I was very lonely and cried every day, sometimes for my parents and sometimes because they beat me. I know I am going to die”, he said.

In Burma military authorities force captured civilians to walk across minefields to locate explosives. Rape of women is an official strategy.

The country has been ruled by a military regime since 1962, the current administration, The State Peace and Development Council, renaming the country Myanmar in 1989. The 1990 national election was won easily by the National League for Democracy, but the regime rejected the result and NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest ever since.

The country’s indigenous groups, 35 per cent of the population, have been ruthlessly oppressed. The UN Commission on Human Rights ratified a statement in 2004 which referred to extrajudicial killings, rape, torture, forced relocation, confiscation of land, child labour, and human trafficking. A 2002 report by The Shan State Human Rights Foundation detailed 173 sexual assault incidents involving 625 girls and women committed by Burmese soldiers between 1996 and 2001.

Rape is officially condoned as a weapon of war against the civilian population as part of their anti-insurgency activities. Eighty-three per cent of the assaults were committed by officers, usually in front of their own troops, involving extreme brutality such as “beating, mutilation and suffocation ... 25 per cent of the rapes resulted in death”. In some cases women were detained and assaulted repeatedly for as long as four months, any who complained tortured or killed.

Ishmael Beah of Sierra Leone spent three years as a child soldier before being rescued by UNICEF. He wrote about his experiences in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and talked about them on Washington television’s Lehrer Newshour. Introducing him Jeffrey Brown said “the face of modern conflict is often a child's face: preteens and teenagers with AK-47s and machetes, often high on drugs, killing and being killed … the United Nations estimates there are 300,000 child soldiers in 19 countries around the world”.

Beah was 12 when civil war came to his village in 1993. Separated from his family he joined a group of boys wandering a country characterised by violence and hunger, before being picked up by government troops and pressed into the army.

To make a boy a killer, Beah explained, you first destroy everything he knows. With his own family gone, the army became his family. “In the beginning it's difficult. But as time goes on the squad becomes your reality, your surrogate family.”

It was kill or be killed. If the squad came across a stranger and the lieutenant told one of them to “shoot this guy” - if he stopped to ask why then he’d get shot himself. The first time they went into battle “it was very apparent you were descending into hell”. They were traumatised by constant violence and use of drugs, this became their world, “you believed in the rhetoric … no remorse, no compassion, it just became what you did”.

After three years he was taken to a UNICEF rehabilitation centre. When someone said to him “None of this [the experiences he had endured] is your fault” he didn’t find it easy to understand or accept.

He explained how you’d lost your original family, then were pressed into conflict as part of a new group in which your reality was to be a soldier. Now, in the rehabilitation centre, he is removed again, so when told “none of this is your fault” he experiences it as “belittling you as a soldier, as a combatant. You wanted to be taken seriously because this is what you've been doing for years, it's become part of your psychological make-up. It takes a while for you to undo that and realise that [what happened] actually was not your fault.”

Beah had to learn how to sleep again, how not to be in a constant state of violence. “There's a lot of undoing that had to happen to return to whatever little of our childhood was left.”