One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [105]
Safety and security tend to be the main concerns for young people immediately after the end of a war, but as security threats lessened, access to education, better healthcare, and the means to make a living took the forefront. Social justice was also a concern that stayed on their minds. A sense of group victimization kept many of the children trapped in their wartime memories. Perhaps, for the young, it was better not to think about it.
Looking at the Albanian children of Kosovo, I saw that their sense of well-being depended on independence, the hope that history would not repeat itself. Their greatest fear was being tied to Serbia, once more at the mercy of the Serbs. For the Serb children, much of their anxiety came from their imprisonment in protected enclaves, their feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile nation, cut off from their own people in Serbia, left at the mercy of the Albanians. In Bosnia, crime and economic hardship dominated the worries of young people. They also worried about war criminals who were still at large, who were keeping populations in terror and keeping people from returning to the homes they lost in the war.
The problems of a post-war society are vast and complex and all of them are connected, especially in a society where ethnic conflict has torn everyone apart. As Kosovo looks toward independence and Serbia looks to block that hope, and as Bosnia tries to enter the European Union and bring its war criminals to justice, the region may once again find itself in turmoil, and many of the children who survived the wars of the 1990s will be the young adults who fight in the new conflicts. Meeting many of these young people, I cannot say if they will choose the path their parents took. I am sure many will. I like to think, however, of Mount Igman and the soccer games I played.
Every evening before dinner most of the kids would gather on that field littered with spent shell casings buried just beneath the dirt. The dog, Prijatelj, would trot along behind us, ignoring the occasional unkind word or tossed stone, and flop himself down under the shade of a tree to watch and to pant. The children, a jumble of different histories and dreams, would pick teams with the toss of a rock, or a coin if one was handy. They put aside their parents’ violent history, their own troubled past, and they kicked the ball around, laughing and passing and dodging and slipping, the way kids do all over, in peace and war and poverty and riches. They played soccer together. They played every evening for as long as they could, at least until it grew too dark to play.
SEVEN
“God Has Something in Store”
What Becomes of War’s Children
In the Autumn of 2004, I received an unexpected phone call from a young man named Joseph. He lived in Michigan, he explained, though he was not from Michigan. He came from a small town in southern Sudan near the White Nile. As a young boy, he had fled because of the bombings and attacks by the government army in Khartoum. He was separated from his family and wandered in the desert with thousands of other youths like himself, the youths who became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. He had survived, he explained, through the grace of God.
He lived with the other boys, his brothers in suffering, he called them, in Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya until, thanks to the U.S. State Department and American church groups, he was put on a plane and given a new life in an American city, resettled to a third country of refuge far from his homeland. He received basic training