One Day the Soldiers Came (9 page)

“I learned that children have the right to go to school.” He shows me his drawing of a boy walking toward a church. Written in Swahili above it is, “The child has the right to do all kinds of work and go to school” (Figure 6).

“School will help me get a good job and become a professional. I would like to live in an urban area again. Here, the environment is very bad. Sometimes people don’t even use the toilets. And when you get sick, it is a long walk to the hospital and then, sometimes, you can’t get anyone to help you.”

Justin’s concerns about public health and cleanliness, his concerns about school resources, were pressing on him. He was aware that schooling was a way to secure his future, one of his “rights,” and that he was in danger of disease from the poor hygienic conditions in the camp. These stresses weighed on his mind a great deal—he brought them up or alluded to them during our talk several times, expressing frustration and once, nearly cried when discussing the uncleanliness. He felt helpless against these things and had no one to whom he could turn. Though he understood the rights he and all children should have, he could do little to realize them, and that might have contributed to his sadness, the realization of just how much he was at the mercy of forces much greater than he was, entire governments and armies and institutions that controlled his fate. A heavy burden of awareness for anyone, let alone a fourteen-year-old orphan.

I liked Justin, though I’m not sure why. He was not as well-spoken as Keto, nor as eager to impress as Michael, nor as cheerful and buoyant as Melanie. He was charismatic, and I wanted him to feel his own worth. With his interest in children’s rights
evident, we talked about my project of researching the lives of young people affected by war. He liked the idea of being an ambassador for young people in situations like his.

“What would you tell someone your age who has never been in a refugee camp so that he could understand what it is like?” I asked him. Justin thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully.

“I would like to tell my name so that he could know me,” he answered. “I would tell him that living in the camp is very bad. I think about going home, but who will I go back to? Everyone is dead. If I talk to this boy who has never been in a refugee camp I would be happy. I want to find children with hope.”

These journeys that children are forced to make are not confined
to Africa. Right now, there are an estimated 20 million children uprooted from their homes around the world, living either as refugees, “migrants,” or internally displaced persons.

“There were many hardships on the journey [from Burma],” Siha said. He was sitting on the floor of the largest room in his little house in Thailand, in a city where many illegal Burmese migrants sought safety. He wore a soccer jersey and black running shorts and poked his tongue out in concentration as he drew his pictures, like eleven-year-olds I had met in other parts of the world. He lived with his aunt, his cousin, and his mother, though his mother was away for a few weeks at the time we met.

“We walked for two days, and it was raining the whole time, and then we rode horses, but my mother and aunt walked. And the river was flooded. We rode with buffalo and cows on a boat and it was very hard. I was afraid to leave home, but I was with my mother so it was okay. Everything was different here. The
place to sleep and the place to live were different. We did not know where we would eat or what we would eat. In Burma, my grandmother would send me to the market for her and it was a very long way. I remember going there and walking far from home to buy different things. Here we did not know what things we would have.”

Siha is considered a migrant because, as a member of the Shan ethnic group, he is not eligible for refugee status in Thailand.

During his journey, Siha had the protection of his family, his mother taking care of things, making sure the children could ride horses instead of walking. As psychiatrists Joseph Westermeyer and Karen Wahmanholm observed in their work with refugee children, fleeing can seem like an adventure if children have a parent or parents insuring continuity and taking responsibility for their survival and well-being. Culturally, the differences in what constitutes childhood affect the way the young experience flight into exile, as do the differences in the wars being fought. In Congo, with the ravages of AIDS and the protracted intensity of the fighting, societal norms have broken down to such a degree that family structures become unraveled and few people have the resources, either emotional or material, to support children who are not their own. Additionally, it is not unusual for young boys to have responsibilities outside the home or for young girls to take care of their siblings. Unaccompanied minors are much more common in the Congo and in refugee camps in East Africa than in the Burmese communities in Thailand. This could also be due to the fact that on the journey out of Burma into Thailand there are several checkpoints controlled by one or another army, dense jungles filled with land mines and armed patrols, and young people on their own simply do not survive.

“It was hard to cross the border. There are robbers, Mon soldiers, Burmese soldiers, Karen soldiers, all wanting money. We had to pay many times at many checkpoints. It was dangerous,” said Nicholas, an eleven-year-old boy from the Karen ethnic group.

On their own, children cannot pay the bribes; perhaps they join or are forced to join the soldiers; perhaps they are turned back by the soldiers and sent home. The Thai authorities regularly round up the Burmese refugees (they are seen as illegal migrants), and send them back to the border areas. Unaccompanied minors would be easy targets for these roundups. They would also be easy prey for the flourishing sex industry in Thailand. On the streets of Bangkok, one can see countless young male and female prostitutes. Due to all these conditions, it is harder to find the Burmese youth who are living on their own. Neither the pimps nor the Thai police nor the Burmese military or rebel groups are inclined to give researchers like me access to the children they control. Though these children may exist in Thailand, I would not have the opportunity to meet them.

Among the Burmese children I met, most of whom had at least one member of their family with them, the troubles of the journey, of the violence witnessed or experienced, were mitigated by the support they received.

“Sometimes I don’t sleep well, and my mother comes to me. I tell her I’m having bad dreams and she tells me it’s okay. We’re here now and we are safe. But I don’t always feel safe,” Nicholas confided in me. We were in a city near the Thai-Burma border, a place where police corruption is rampant and smuggling flourishes in diamonds, drugs, weapons, and people. Burmese children are particularly vulnerable, and these stresses bother Nicholas as much as the memories of his village.

“One day the SPDC”—State Peace and Development Council, the name of the military junta—“came and burnt my village,
so I wanted to draw this,” he said, showing me the picture he produced when I asked a group of school kids to draw anything they liked. “I don’t know why they did it, burnt my village. I ran with my family into the mountains and crossed into Thailand. The army would have arrested us if they’d caught us trying to leave, but we snuck out through a secret way.”

His drawing captivated me.

Nailed to a cross, a young man cries out as soldiers fill his body with bullets. To the right, a soldier climbs a flagpole and takes down the unmarked flag. Bodies fall from the sky, dropping from an exploded airplane. On the far left, easy to miss at first glance, is a little form in purple, a boy hiding behind a tree (Figure 7).

Nicholas’s blank flag, the flag of the defeated, shows a keen awareness of his situation. He is an illegal migrant hiding in Thailand, unable to attain legal refugee status and clearly unable to return to his homeland. He doesn’t speak Thai. He has no nation. The blank flag is central to his picture. Even as his little purple form—he shrugs when I ask if that is him—witnesses terrible violence, he also witnesses the political struggle occurring around him. He cannot verbalize the politics of the fighting, but he has a sense of them: it has something to do with that flag; the reason he and his parents fled is connected to that flag.

Violent forced migrations, political struggles robbing children of their homelands, are not unique to the developing world. In the Serbian province of Kosovo, in the last years of the twentieth century, a policy of ethnic cleansing filled the roads with terrified people running for their lives and killed hundreds of fathers, brothers, and uncles. The violence displaced nearly one million people.

One of those was a young girl named Nora from the village of Zahaq. She was about eight years old at the time she had to flee the country.

They took one of her uncles, though. They shot him with a silencer and dragged him inside his house and burnt him there. They wrapped him in a blanket so he would burn easier. “We knew it was him later by how we was wrapped and that his face was not burned. I saw him after the house burnt down.”

As she told me this story, I felt overwhelmed. So much could happen to a little girl on a sunny day in May. It happened near her school where we were sitting five years later. There were three other young people from the village with us, all of whom
had also suffered terribly at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries. The others wanted to tell their stories too. Nora told them to hold on. Her frightful tale was not yet done and she wanted to make sure the narrative was complete.

“We went to our neighbor’s home and lots of people were gathered there listening to the news. The paramilitaries came and beat us with rifle butts and clubs and their fists and told us to say good-bye to each other because they were going to kill us soon. We stayed there two more weeks, though, and the Serbs didn’t come back. We stayed two more weeks until some other Serbs came, put us in a line, and made us leave.”

The children began to describe this line, which, at the time, they and all their families joined. It was a line of people and vehicles starting in the center of town and directed to head out of Kosovo towards Montenegro. There were buses on the road. Those who had cars loaded them with their families and whatever property they could fit. People rode on tractors and horse-drawn carts. People also walked. It was Gibbon’s highway “crowded with a trembling multitude.” It was along this line that the next wave of horrors occurred.

“Army men in black masks stopped us,” Nora said. “They took some men from the line, who disappeared.”

Mark, who had been eager to interject, finally cut in.

“They took my father when we were in this line. They took him from right in front of me and two of my first cousins too, and shot them. But my father survived. He lay under the bodies until they were gone.”

“They tried to take my father,” another boy, Karl, said. “They didn’t though. The truck driver that was taking us, turned around.”

“I was with Karl on the same truck,” Valerie added. She brushed her long blond hair from her face. “They took my father and five of my uncles. They killed them.”

Human Rights Watch reports that nineteen people were killed in Zahaq on May 14, 1999.

“They killed my father later,” Karl said. “When the Serbs were pulling out [after three months of NATO air strikes on Serb positions], a yellow Mercedes came into the village, and the men in it shot him.”

The retention of details amazed me, as did the way these stories played out for children of all social classes. In Africa, it had mostly been the poor who were forced to flee, as most of the fighting took place in or around villages. Wealthier citizens stayed in the cities, hired protection, or left the conflict areas altogether with resources to pay bribes and avoid refugee camps. The youths I met in the Balkans, in the villages of Zahaq and Lubeniq and Pavlan, were poor even before the war, and Kosovo remains the poorest province in the former Yugoslavia. But in this war the wealthy also had to flee and children of well-to-do families were no more protected from the terror of expulsion than anyone else.

Eric, an energetic twelve-year-old, and his fifteen-year-old-sister Alice, are the children of a wealthy Kosovar Albanian businessman.

“In the afternoon on the Saturday after the NATO bombing started,” Alice said, “the Serbs came to our house.”

Eric interrupted her with a great deal of eagerness:

“Captain Death came to our house.” The children didn’t know his real name. But according to Human Rights Watch, Captain “Death” (“Mrtvi”) was a known paramilitary and criminal leader in the city of Peja (Peč, in Serbian). His real name was Nebojsa Minic. He was directly implicated in the murder of six family members on June 12, 1999, but the siblings tell me: “He killed sixty-eight people.” They repeated the number: “Sixty-eight.” When I asked how they knew, the kids said they
heard it somewhere. They added, “He killed our neighbor the same day he came to our house.”