COLUMN ONE : Sending Children to War : From Mozambique to Bosnia, youngsters are being used as soldiers, spies and cannon fodder. After the fighting ends, the emotional scars rarely heal. ‘It’s barbarism,’ one observer says.

On the opening day of school recently, Rodrigo Armondo Novela sat silently amid a crowd of chattering children in the first-grade class at the Chibuto Primary School.

Like all of his classmates, he sat on the concrete floor because there were no desks or chairs. Unlike theirs, his hands and bare feet were enormous. At 17, the sad-faced teen-ager towered over his fellow first-graders.

Novela stood out for another reason. He had spent more than a decade as a child soldier for the Renamo rebel army in the bloody civil war that ended in late 1992. Armed with a pistol and AK-M assault rifle, he killed his first government soldier when he was 9.

“I felt bad,” he recalled. “But my commanders were very happy and satisfied with me, and they shook my hands. . . . Afterward, it didn’t cause so much anguish to kill.”

Like thousands of other children forced to fight during the 16-year war, Novela was kidnaped as a toddler. Reared in a remote Renamo bush camp, he was assigned to carry water, then ammunition and, finally, a tripod-mounted machine gun.

He was shot in the chest and nearly blinded by shrapnel. But in an infantry unit with more boys than men and more casualties than survivors, Novela was lucky: He lived. “I saw many boys die in the fighting,” he said softly.

He witnessed summary executions, survived on scanty rations and endured monthlong marches across heavily mined country. After a battle, he helped loot the enemy dead, especially for boots. “We’d wear the boots until they fell off,” he said. “I was barefoot, mostly.”

Unfortunately, Novela’s grim childhood memories are not unique, either in Mozambique or in more than a dozen other countries. Although hardly new in the annals of war, the use of child soldiers has increased dramatically in recent years, according to the United Nations.

“The problem is growing both in the number of children and in the number of conflicts,” said Graca Machel, who is directing for the U.N. General Assembly the first global study of children at war. “And it’s just ignored.”

In most wars, children are tragic but innocent victims. The humanitarian group Save the Children estimates that more than 1.5 million children have been killed in conflicts from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kashmir in the last decade.

Millions more have been orphaned, maimed by mines or left with shattered lives and little hope. The homeless haunt city streets from Luanda to Kabul, easy prey to drugs, sexual abuse and disease. An estimated 5 million live in squalid refugee camps.

But to a growing extent, and in violation of international law that bans combatants under 15, children also have been press-ganged to serve as soldiers and porters in guerrilla armies in Afghanistan, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala and parts of the Middle East and South Asia.

“From conflict to conflict, we not only find more and more children used, but in new and more horrifying ways,” said Machel, who is the widow of Mozambique’s first post-independence president, Samora M. Machel.

In Sri Lanka, for example, Tamil separatists deployed suicide squads of children known as “Baby Tigers” several years ago to assault government fortifications with bombs strapped to their bodies--and cyanide capsules to swallow in case they were captured.

In the 1980s, during the savage war between Iran and Iraq, children reportedly were sent to clear minefields by foot, and hailed as martyrs when they were blown up. In former Soviet republics, and in the remnants of Yugoslavia, boys follow their fathers into bitter wars of nationalist fervor or “ethnic cleansing.”

But child soldiers appear to be most common--and most brutal--in Africa.

In Rwanda’s genocidal war last year, children of the Hutu ethnic group committed some of the worst atrocities, including torture and massacres of children from another group, the Tutsis. In largely hidden wars in Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Sudan, boys--and often girls--are now fighting and dying.

In many cases, experts say, children enlist voluntarily for protection, to avenge their family’s deaths or simply to get food and clothing--to survive. But human rights groups say other children are kidnaped at gunpoint and flogged, raped or beaten to ensure obedience.

Thousands of boys, for example, have been forced to fight in the civil war that rages in southern Sudan, Africa’s largest country. Boys as young as 11 are sent to the front lines, according to a Human Rights Watch/Africa report last November. “Hundreds of boys have been killed or grievously wounded in combat; others have died of starvation or disease far from home,” it noted.

Similarly, the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, estimates that at least 6,000 children under 15 have been forced to fight in Liberia’s six-year civil war. Many use amphetamines and marijuana to ward off fear, and black magic in hopes of warding off bullets. Because they are not paid, they prey on the populace.

“Some have been used as spies, some as executioners, some as cannon fodder to draw the fire of adversaries,” said another report by Human Rights Watch/Africa. “Many . . . staff checkpoints, where they have killed or terrorized civilians for no apparent reason.”

Local commanders in Liberia, as elsewhere, have discovered a terrible truth: Children make good killers. They look to adults for leadership, follow orders blindly and murder without mercy. Guns become toys, and cruelty just another game with which to win peer approval.

“They have no judgment,” said Esther Gulima, a UNICEF official in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. “Someone tells them to do something, they do it. They don’t know right from wrong.”

Their emotional scars often are hidden behind a sullen mask of indifference and anger. Some children agonize over atrocities they watched or performed. Denied proper food and schooling, many are stunted physically, emotionally and intellectually.

“It’s the ultimate abuse of children,” Graca Machel said in Johannesburg, South Africa, where her two-year U.N. study is based.

“These children, most of the time they were forced to leave their homes,” she said. “So they lose their cultural and social terms of reference. Some saw their parents assassinated. Some saw their mothers or sisters raped. They saw their teachers killed and schools burned.”

In Mozambique, she said, some Renamo rebels forced children to attack and loot their own villages to prove their loyalty and demoralize survivors.

“A 12-year-old was forced to set fire to the huts where his family lay sleeping,” she said. “They wanted to test him. So he burned. People then fled the homes. They told him to shoot them. So he shot them.”

Her face flared in fury. “It’s not really war. It’s just barbarism. There are rules in war. When children are used, there are no principles, no values, no rules.”

There are also no easy answers for how to turn child-killers into children again--or how to rehabilitate a nation that lost a generation of youth in the terrors of war. Mozambique is a tragic case study.

The civil war that claimed as many as 1 million lives ended with the Rome Accord of November, 1992. The peace was sealed with U.N.-supervised, multi-party elections last October. But the carnage left an estimated 200,000--no one really knows the number--orphaned, disabled and tormented children.

It also left what the World Bank considers the world’s poorest country. More than half the schools and health clinics were destroyed; millions of murderous mines litter the land, and a flood of returning refugees have added vast new demands to the struggling democracy.

The United Nations’ first priority after peace was to disarm and demobilize the warring armies. But Renamo initially denied using underage troops and hid the child soldiers at tightly guarded bases.

A UNICEF report thus cited “perhaps the greatest of ironies and embarrassment” that the first Renamo soldier to be demobilized was a 16-year-old. After shaking hands with Renamo President Afonso Dhlakama, the youth told the media that he had been kidnaped at 9, had undergone military training the same year “and has been fighting ever since.”

Renamo finally bowed to international pressure last March, and nearly 5,000 children held by Renamo soon surfaced at U.N. transit centers. The International Committee of the Red Cross registered most as “unaccompanied children,” but at least 800 were “war-experienced youth.”

Their problems were hardly over. Because the United Nations does not recognize combatants under 16, many were denied the six-month salary, tools, seeds and other aid given to demobilized troops. Armed children revolted at two camps, demanding the same benefits as other soldiers.

Aid agencies scrambled to reunite youngsters with their families, and set up home visits and other assistance to ease their readjustment. Many parents had been killed or had fled. Some children had been snatched when they were so young that they didn’t know their home villages. And some refused to go home or were rejected by their families for the abuses they had committed.

In any case, the United Nations admits that the total number of underage soldiers undoubtedly was far higher. Thousands are believed to have left Renamo bases before the Red Cross was allowed in. And others are still coming out.

Francisco Joao Thole, 15, arrived at the provincial orphanage in the dusty western town of Chimoio from his Renamo military base in January, for example. That was months after all children supposedly were released to the Red Cross.

Thole knows only that he was kidnaped when he was very young and that his parents were shot by the rebel commander.

“They were killed in front of him,” said orphanage director Julio Luciano.

He said Thole became the brigadier’s personal aide. “The child accompanied him on daily military operations,” Luciano said. “He saw many battles.”

Thole will be taken to his home province of Tete and reunited with any surviving family members, Luciano said. For now, the youth is “very passive, very timid. He does everything with fear.”

That’s common, psychiatrists say. Many former child soldiers suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: sleeplessness, nightmares, flashbacks, bed-wetting, depression and distrust. But little is known of the long-term effects or how best to help heal them.

The most ambitious attempt to treat war-traumatized children in Mozambique is a Red Cross-run program called Brincar Curando, Portuguese for “healing through play.”

Working from a new, $1-million center in Chimoio, psychologist Enrique Querol uses games, songs and traditional healers in hopes of alleviating the pain and guilt of the most disturbed children.

“In the West, traumatized children tend to be more aggressive,” he said. “Here, they are incredibly passive, apathetic. They are listless. They don’t work, they don’t play, they don’t join in anything. They go one month without talking.”

Traveling from village to village, his teams use toys, gardening, skits and dances to draw the youngsters out. “These children were forced to do terrible things,” he said. “The idea is to purify them so they can come back into their communities.”

Several hours after Querol made those remarks, nine traditional healers--called curanderos --performed the purification rite in a nearby hamlet in an effort to exorcise evil spirits from local children. Waving talismans of feathers and hair, the women writhed feverishly, pounded their feet and blew shrill whistles as throbbing drums filled the still afternoon air.

Watching from under a tree, 13-year-old Simao Manuel spoke of the spirit that has haunted him since he was kidnaped by Renamo. “They captured (a government soldier) and cut off his head,” he whispered, his dark eyes downcast.

Beside him, Cristina Afonso, now 15, said older girls were regularly raped at the base where she was held captive. “I was afraid, very afraid.” She added that she would never marry a soldier. “He could kill me.”

Getting children to speak the unspeakable--to recount the murder of a parent, the bloody slashing of a throat, the image of a head on a post--is a key step toward recovery. Only then can they forgive themselves.

Still, Querol does not know if traditional rites of healing work any better than modern ways. After two years of work with thousands of children, he is not optimistic.

“I cannot say with any great certainty that there’s any real progress,” he said sadly.