Children/Youth as Peacebuilders ~ Our Work

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Youth and Reconciliation: New Focus for CAP’s Work

In Colombia and northern Uganda reconciliation has become an important focus for CAP’s work. CAP is currently in the process of developing new initiatives in both these countries – more information on the results of this work will be available shortly.

What do we mean by reconciliation? How does it affect young people?

Reconciliation is generally understood as a process whereby parties in a dispute are able to overcome the pain caused by a conflict; resolve their grievances and find ways to build trust and live cooperatively with each other in the future. There is a wide acknowledgement that the depth and strength of reconciliation sow the possibilities or limitations for peace to succeed. What is less recognized are the complexities of reconciliation for children and youth. In fact, in all the literature and studies on this issue, few, if any, address issues of reconciliation from the varying positions of young people as spectators, victims and participants in today’s civil wars.

While security, food, shelter and education are quickly identified as the necessary foundations for their future, young people also talk about the social factors that affect the possibility for lasting peace. Four of these findings, listed below, are framing the priorities for CAP’s work in the next two years.

1. Today’s civil wars have created a youth population which has grown up inside a social/cultural limbo.

A recent study by ACORD, Africa, noted that traditional reconciliation customs often have little meaning for young people as they have not been educated in the meaning of these traditions. At the same time, a scholar in Angola has identified the lack of cultural identity as one of the most crucial problems undermining Angola’s future peace prospects. As he noted, “Without these, what do you base your reference points for understanding and reconciling with others who have hurt you or your family?” In workshops with youth, they will talk about how they don’t know who they are. Young people will question the possibility of reconciling with a past that is as obscure to them as is their future.

2. Many youth describe themselves as pawns used by all sides.

Young people are frustrated by the lack of meaningful inclusion in political processes that don’t even frame questions in ways that recognize their realities. As young people repeatedly state, “It is fine to use us for fighting and killing but if we ask to be included in working for peace, they tell us we are too young.”

3. The habits of violence are almost an accepted condition of life.

People will speak about the need to “disarm” the mind before campaigns for arms control can be expected to have any success. Youth will question whether a peace process will change their life in any real way. In CAP young people continually speak of the high levels and different types of social violence. For many this is equally bad inside as outside the home. They feel frighteningly alone, left to their own devices with no one to protect them and no where to go.

Many link the use of child soldiers as a function of technology and small weapons. While this is, we agree, one part of the picture, it is equally true that there is little separation in time, space or mentality between the battlefield and civilian life.

4. Many young people have complex issues of guilt, understanding and forgiveness to resolve as part of their individual reconciliation.

If these issues are most evident with child soldiers, they are just as important in other situations. Many young people express feelings of confusion at being told for years to hate “the others” and then to be asked to forgive and forget once a peace agreement is signed. Neither memory nor feelings work that way. As a youth worker in Burundi stated, “We need another form of education. Without it, we will just have another war in 10 years and it won’t be the older adults fighting, it will be the young people who grew up inside this war and are just waiting for their turn to fight.”

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