Myanmar still enlists boy soldiers despite reforms

(Washington Post) – He disappeared when he was 12 years old, a skinny boy named Min Thu from the wrong side of town who thought he’d stumbled onto the golden ticket. It began one afternoon when a swaggering, potbellied businessman bumped into Thu at the market, offering him an escape from a neighborhood where the houses are made of lumberyard scraps and the air smells of fish and decay and woodsmoke. It ended with four years in the army. The businessman, a small-town mogul of plastic kitchenware and cheap polyester clothing, has three tiny shops. To Thu, whose father makes a living pedaling a bicycle rickshaw through the streets of this small beachside town, he seemed impossibly successful.

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