8 - ‘New Wars: Forgotten Warriors’: Why Have Girl Fighters Been Excluded from Western Representations of Conflict in Sierra Leone?

Abstract

Since the end of the cold war, the way we talk about war has changed. Instead of talking about ‘noble’ inter-state warfare, as was common in the past, there is a new Western vocabulary depicting modern conflict as chaotic and callous. Child soldiers are seen as emblematic element of the ‘new wars’, yet the presence of girl fighters has been continually ignored by the international community and neglected in academic writing. When girls have attracted attention, it has been purely as victims. Using a case study of Sierra Leone, this essay analyses how the Western representation of girls as victims plays into the Western construction of Africa as a place needful of military and humanitarian intervention. By looking at discourses of gender and youth, I examine how the construction of the girl child is integral to maintaining the myth of the young ‘aggressive’ African male and the white ‘saviour’; both essential for ‘new wars’ and the humanitarian industry. The conflict in Sierra Leone has been considered by many academics as a prime example of a ‘new war’ (Kaplan 1994; Kaldor 2001) and thus lends itself particularly well to the subject under discussion. The emphasis in the West has been on the ‘barbarity’ and high level of atrocities carried out by combatants 1 as well as the use of child soldiers. As Rosen points out, it is seen as a ‘symbol of the horrors of modern war’ (2005:58) and continues to attract media attention, as has done the recent film Blood Diamonds shows. Sierra Leone has also been chosen as a case study because of the high level of female participation in the conflict (Mazurana and Carlson 2004:2) and because of the recognition that girls were failed in the Demobilisation Demilitarization and Reintegration (DDR) process (Coulter 2005), which I shall briefly touch on in this essay, although space limits a more detailed analysis.