Taking the war out of a child soldier.

• Author: Bernstein, Nina

Last November, Salifou Yankene, 18, stepped off a plane at Kennedy Airport in New York and asked for asylum. "I want to make refugee," said the former child soldier from the ivory Coast.

He arrived knowing no one, and, like many of the 5,000 unaccompanied minors detained each year, had no valid identity documents.

A few months tater, Elliot Kaye, a lawyer from Brooklyn, took his case without fee.

Kaye soon realized that saving Yankene would require much more than winning him asylum: He had been traumatized by his years as a child soldier and needed help.

Only a few child soldiers have ever it to the United States, but campaigns to halt recruitment and rehabilitate survivors are resonating here, in part because of the bestselling memoir by former child soldier Ishmael. Beah [see p. 21].

PERSECUTOR OR VICTIM?

Yet no one has really grappled with how to handle those who make it to this country seeking refuge.

Their violent pasts pose hard questions: Should they be considered persecutors--and therefore legally barred from asylum--or should they be considered victims and offered our protection? How can they be healed, and who will, help them?

In the case of Yankene, asylum was ultimately granted. But before his release in April., he was detained in a New Jersey jail and lived in constant fear of deportation.

Yankene also battled emotional. problems, and was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Sometimes, the lawyers said, he was a petulant teenager, or an angry soldier; other times he was a dreamy child, longing to be magically transported back to a time when pillow fights were his only combat.

At one point, after confiding to a...