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Summary: FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, May 8 - He was 14 years old when the rebels seized the capital here, back in 1998, and forced him to join them. A boy with a precocious intensity and frigid self-assuredness, he rose quickly in the ranks and earned the fighting name Poison. By NORIMITSU ONISHI FREETOWN, Sierra Leone, May 8 — He was 14 years old when the rebels seized the capital here, back in 1998, and forced him to join them. A boy with a precocious intensity and frigid self- assuredness, he rose quickly in the ranks and earned the fighting name Poison. Poison fought in Kono in the east, the source of West Africa's most prized diamonds and of Sierra Leone's decade-long war. Then in January 1999, he joined his brethren of the Revolutionary United Front in the most violent attack ever on Freetown, in which thousands of civilians were killed, raped or had their arms chopped off. "I was ordered to kill by my commander," he recalled, leaving at that his recollection of the fateful month. Still, one morning this week, he was hard at work at an auto shop here, with only his legs and blue flip-flops sticking out from under a small bus. He got up, his face covered with big beads of sweat, his hands with deep stains of grease, evidence of the eight months he has spent learning to be a mechanic and forging a new life for himself. The boy was one of more than 5,400 children who the United Nations Children's Fund estimates were forced to fight in Sierra Leone, which according to almost every social indicator ranks as the worst place in the world to be a child. But with the war over and Sierra Leone holding elections next Tuesday, most of the child soldiers have been demobilized and more than 3,400 were reunited with their families last year. About 300,000 boys and girls around the world are believed to be involved in about 30 armed conflicts — working as soldiers, porters, cooks or sex slaves — and their plight is a focus of the United Nations meeting on children this week in New York. In Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo and Sudan, children have played a central role in unconventional wars that have blurred the distinctions between soldier and civilian, and adult and child. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the use of child soldiers must be "recognized as intolerable." Olara Otunnu, Mr. Annan's special representative for children and armed conflict, said a goal of the summit meeting was to take the fight against the use of child soldiers beyond words. "The international community has done very well in terms of developing and elaborating norms, standards and rules against the use of child soldiers," Mr. Otunnu said in a telephone interview from New York. "But where we have not been effective is their application on the ground. Words on paper do not save a child in war." Mr. Otunnu said that proposals included setting up a system to monitor the use of child soldiers then issuing formal reports that would "name and shame" guilty parties, and developing local networks of civil organizations that would protect children from being used in conflicts. He also said that a list of governments and groups employing child soldiers would be presented to the Security Council later this year for possible punitive action. In Sierra Leone, significant numbers of child combatants, some as young as 6, were released a year ago, mostly by the Revolutionary United Front. All warring sides here used child soldiers, most of them abducted. But many teenagers also volunteered to fight, having few alternatives. Child soldiers were often drugged to steel them for battles and were forced to commit atrocities, sometimes against their neighbors. In the last year, according to Unicef, more than 4,200 child soldiers were demobilized. About 8 percent were girls, who were usually forced to become domestic workers, sex slaves or wives to commanders. After demobilization, the children were sent to temporary care centers before being released to their families, who were given money. Many children received start-up kits for a trade of their choice, and others were placed in schools and had their fees paid. Many children have not followed through with their training or studies and some have sold their kits, including sewing machines and tools. But others have kept up, and this week Unicef allowed three of them to be interviewed with the condition that their identities not be revealed. All three, two boys and a girl, were in programs administered by a private Italian organization, International Cooperation. The girl, 16, is now studying at a school on the outskirts of Freetown. On Monday afternoon, she was helping her older sister run a small grocery stand. Her mother lives elsewhere; her father was killed during a rebel attack in 1994. It was, she remembered, during the January 1999 rebel invasion of Freetown that she was kidnapped. She was laundering clothes in her neighborhood, Calaba Town in eastern Freetown, when rebels arrived firing shots. The operation, she would learn later, was called "Spare No Living Thing." The girl hid under a bed; a cousin was shot dead. The rebels found her and handed her over to their leader, known as Scorpion. She traveled with Scorpion, who like many united front leaders was Liberian, until they met his wife. She ordered Scorpion to give the girl up to a commander known as Colonel Dukulay, also a Liberian. As the 16-year-old girl sat on a wooden bench, her red toenails peeking from under her sandals, she remembered how she became one of Colonel Dukulay's three wives in the Revolutionary United Front's stronghold of Makeni. It was a year ago, she said, that a visitor to Makeni told her that her older sister was alive and living in Freetown. She decided to leave and told Colonel Dukulay, who seized her belongings, but she fled, along with another girl. "My sister cried when she saw me, and I felt happy," she said. Last semester, she ranked eighth in a class of 39 students. "I want to continue studying and become an accountant," she said. "My senior brother is an accountant and I want to be like him." Across town, in the auto shop where Poison was learning to be a mechanic, another former child soldier was busy at work. He was 12 years old when he was abducted by united front soldiers in his home region, Kono. One night in 1994, he and his mother were ambushed in a forest while trying to reach neighboring Guinea. His mother was killed by a stray bullet. He became a soldier. He fought, he said, but had too nervous a temperament to become a good fighter. Accordingly, his superiors nicknamed him, "Someday Good, Someday Bad." Others maimed and raped; he could not, he said. "After I saw how my mother was killed, I had sympathy for others," he said, wincing at the memory. "I never believed in the R.U.F.," he said. "They just told us to fight, to ambush, to loot towns. Nobody was telling us anything about the future. This work is fine. I came here knowing nothing about being a mechanic. Now I can repair a carburetor. One day, I want to start my own workshop." The owner of the auto shop, Sanusie Jallow, 35, said the former child soldiers learned quickly and had become good workers. He was especially impressed with the progress made by Poison. A troublemaker at first, now the boy never missed work. Last Sunday, when the united front, which is now a political party, sent members to invite the boy to a rally, he refused. "That's when I knew he had changed," Mr. Jallow said. Asked why he had turned down the invitation, the boy said, "I don't want to be part of it any longer."