Growing Up In Africa's Cruelest War Zone.(child soldiers of Sierra Leone)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

It's terrible to be a child anyplace without adequate food, shelter or access to education. Add war, and society's youngest members face a life of relentless horror and uncertainty. But even war seldom produces the kind of cruelty endured by children in Sierra Leone. Over the past two decades rebels there and in Liberia have systematically used child abuse as a military strategy. First children as young as 7 or 8 are abducted. The girls are raped. Boys are forcibly injected with drugs and made to perform an atrocity: sometimes they must kill their own parents, or they might be forced to chop off someone's hand. Those who refuse are killed. Afterward some become porters and sex slaves; others are mustered into child-soldier units. "The process of abducting children and forming them into rebel fighters is not something that happens by accident," says Corinne Difka of Human Rights Watch. "This was a plan that they thought out: to take these young people from their families and form them into effective soldiers."

Child soldiers are fearless. For good reason: they go into battle stoked with drugs. Sometimes the drugs are packed under adhesive bandages and seep into a slit cut into the child's face. The rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front also forces children to use marijuana and amphetamines. Refusal is punishable by death. "I was not afraid of anything [on cocaine]," Ibrahim, 16, told Amnesty International. "I became bloody." Another young fighter commented: "I saw other people as chickens and rats. I wanted to kill them." Child soldiers never get a chance to attend school. They live on meager rations in the bush and face execution if they are caught trying to escape.

But the era of the child soldier may be ending in this tormented corner of West Africa. Last spring the Revolutionary United Front began sending home members of its small-boy units, ...