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THE United Nations Children’s Fund estimated last week that 9,000 children had been recruited into fighting in South Sudan. Both sides of the conflict were implicated in arming children, who were given weapons and military uniforms and taken to various conflict areas. When interviewed by journalists, the children insisted that they were older, 17 or 18.
According to the testimony of former child soldiers, the rebels in South Sudan like to have children run ahead to draw out enemy fire. If the kids die before the adult soldiers, there is less of a loss accrued to their side; they have a better chance of winning.
If the rebels in South Sudan are heartless in their subjection of children to the frontlines, the recruiters of various Pakistani and Afghan extremist groups are worse. A report published in The Guardian last year described the hundreds of child would-be suicide bombers in the juvenile detention centre in Kandahar. When given a piece of paper, the report described, the children would write fiery arguments expressing their fervour to become suicide bombers. The temporary incarceration is but a tiny hurdle in their path; their mothers tell them that they will one day be successful.
The frustration of these young would-be suicide bombers, whose iterations can be found on either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, is understandable. According to the report, and scores of others published in the Pakistani press, becoming a suicide bomber is a matter of much competition. In the small villages from where most child suicide bombers are recruited, parents reportedly compete to have their male children sent to madressahs.
The ‘other’ children of war cannot escape it either. Their existence is distorted in its own way.
While this does not mean that the child will be given up to become a suicide bomber, it is the first step in a path. The child can move from one madressah to another, eventually ending up in training for a suicide mission. The lies and limits of these sad lives are well known: the children are put through gruelling physical routines, told that their index finger is the one they should use to detonate their suicide vests.
Sometimes they are successful and sometimes they are caught. In the suicide bombing at the Sakhi Sarwar shrine in 2011, two teenaged bombers managed to blow themselves up, killing nearly 50 people. A third was caught by the police when he bumped into an elderly woman and a grenade dropped from his hand. When the woman screamed, the young bomber was arrested.
The other two left behind their heads and, in the case of one, a school identity card that showed just how young he had been. The one left behind, like the Afghan children, expressed regret at the fact that he had not been able to complete the attack. It had been, he believed, his one route to paradise.
The children thrust into the frontlines in South Sudan or the kids strapped into suicide bombs are the direct casualties of war. Theirs are the visible wounds of childhood abbreviated and small hearts and minds set to the task of taking other lives. They come from haplessness and live in hopelessness; childish dreams and death all mixed up in lives shorter than breaths, dreams never quite allowed to form, lives never quite taking root.
These are the children who are born only to die, who are the hostages of a hostile age where no empathy remains to mourn their innocence. The aims of rebels and governments and armies are much larger than them; invisible in life, they are not remembered in death.
There are other casualties of this war on children. The wealthy of Pakistan imagine their children insulated against the vagaries of the war that litters corpses all across the rest of the country. The posse of armed guards, the bullet-proof cars, the secured dwellings and the sojourns abroad are all imagined as the means that make war vanish.
In equipping their progeny with such a life, the rich assume that they will not be touched by the war around them. Theirs is a curious conundrum: their large fortunes depend on squeezing the coffers of the country; their future depends on ensuring their children are untouched by it. In purchasing the armed bubbles, enabled by the very inequalities that lie at the root of war itself, the wealthy believe that it can be wished away — or at least confined to the poor.
As it happens, however, these ‘other’ children of war cannot escape it either. The presence of armed bodyguards that follow every move, waiting outside the classroom and inside the car, the presence of bullets and weapons next to every waking breath, impute their own costs. Born to war, their existence — so sequestered and beleaguered, always threatened by kidnappers and killers — is distorted in its own way. The world they wake up to is constructed by the demands of war, a world of high walls, reinforced concrete and constant threat.
For the rich child or the poor child, then, there is no running from war. The poor are caught in the crossfire, indoctrinated into the ranks; the rich are subsumed in the fortress of their own fortunes. Neither is free and neither can afford the luxury of hope. They testify together to the one truth, that war and childhood cannot exist together, that the innocence and mirth associated with the early years is an indulgence that can only be accommodated in times of peace.
The truth of their tragedies is thus united in a way that the rich and poor children of Pakistan can otherwise never be, paying in different ways for the costs and crimes of others.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, June 11th, 2014
