One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [9]
Light weaponry, cheap to get and easy to use, has changed the way wars are fought, moving them from remote areas on the fringes of society to the center of villages and farms, the streets of cities. Worldwide, 2 million children died as a result of armed conflict in the 1990s, more than 20 million children were displaced, uprooted from their homes by violence and forced to flee. More than 6 million were disabled or wounded, and an estimated 300,000 were recruited into military or paramilitary forces as soldiers, porters, cooks, minesweepers, sentries, spies, or sex-slaves. Children, especially adolescents, have become more central to the way wars are fought, as targets of violence and as combatants. Their involvement in modern wars cannot be classified as passive.
Children are, rightly, of great concern to any society, but because of that, they become its most often used (and misused) rhetorical tools, its obsession. The word “children” is invoked to support all kinds of political agendas, depending on the need of the individual or group invoking them.
In the madness of modern warfare, there is a method to the exploitation of children. In the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, pictures of dead children are displayed as a call to arms, to continue the political struggle in their name. I still marvel at funerals in which angry demonstrators carry large placards bearing the photo of the deceased child, just days after the child died. How did they get the photo so fast? How did they have it enlarged and printed and distributed so quickly? Someone must have gone to the relatives immediately, looking for a good martyr photograph of the child, or the relatives must have thought to present it right away.
When Israeli shells killed seven members of a Palestinian family on a beach in Gaza in June 2006, Palestinian leaders did not hesitate to turn the one surviving child, seven-year-old Huda Ghalia, into a potent symbol of the conflict with Israel. Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniya symbolically adopted the girl within hours of her parents’ deaths. While the funeral was underway, Hamas renewed its rocket attacks on Israel in retaliation.
In nationalist struggles from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia, politicians have called on the people to rise up against their enemies in order to protect their children’s future, their children’s rights. In the prelude to the genocide in Rwanda, rumors were spread that Tutsis had attacked children at school and were working together to prevent the Hutus from having a future in Rwanda. The next step for any Hutu interested in protecting his children’s future was to attack and eliminate the Tutsi completely.
In Bosnia, during the siege of Sarajevo, people risked darting into sniper zones to drag injured children to safety. Also during the siege, young girls were targeted for gang rape and brutal torture in order to demoralize the entire society. When a shell was fired into the yard of a Sarajevo kindergarten, killing several small children, a friend told me with horror that the shell casing was engraved with the words: “A hot kiss from us to you.” How she heard this, I do not know. It might be apocryphal, but that she used it to illustrate the worst horrors of the siege, when there were plenty of verifiable horrors to describe, showed just how terribly war crimes against children shake people.
In the 2006 clashes between