One Day the Soldiers Came (3 page)

There were other names, Vuk Brankovic, the traitor, and Milos, the hero. There are countless versions of this story, and they vary widely depending on who is doing the telling, an Albanian or a Serb. As these children told the story, it went like this:

Murat and his armies invaded Kosovo, which was the holiest land for the Serbs, the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox religion. Monasteries and churches dotted the region. Many of them still stand today, though fewer after the 1998 war and the riots in 2004 that left much of the nation’s treasures smoldering. Prince Lazar raised an army to defend the Serbian kingdom, but one of his noblemen, Vuk Brankovic, made a deal with the Turks.

“He was a traitor,” Marko said with venom. “Without him maybe….” But he didn’t finish the sentence, the distant look on his face led me to believe he was imagining a Kosovo controlled by his people for six hundred years, a Kosovo where he
was not in the minority, penned into fortified enclaves for his own safety, subject to the whims and rages of politicians and mobs. I wanted to ask him what he was going to say, but never got the chance. Eager Miroslaw continued with the story.

During the battle, a brave knight named Milos managed to trick his way behind Turkish lines. Pretending to offer himself in service to Murat, he knelt to kiss the sultan’s hand. Instead, he stabbed Murat in the side, gravely wounding him.

“He did this because of Brankovic,” Katja added. According to the kids, Brankovic betrayed Lazar, who was his father-in-law, by quitting the field at the height of the battle, thus allowing the Turks to penetrate the Serb lines, capture Lazar, and take control of Kosovo.

“They captured Lazar, see,” Marko repeated, and pointed again to Miroslaw’s drawing. It was Lazar whose head decorated the point of the pike. At his death, Lazar became a martyr.

“Tell him about the speech,” Stefan said. Stefan had not spoken much since the story began. He seemed far more concerned with the mechanics of soccer than the details of history, but
the speech
, that was the piece that lit him up. He stopped the game again and held the ball under his foot.

“You do it,” Marko said and Stefan did not need to be told twice.

“Before the battle,” Stefan said, “Lazar spoke to his soldiers. He told them that he would fight for their God, and win the Kingdom of Heaven. Lazar said: It is better to die in battle than to live in shame.”

Stefan was visibly moved as he spoke these words. The others nodded, and gazed at Lazar in the drawing, frozen in crayon, having lost his head, having lost his kingdom.

The way they told this story struck me in the same way they talked about the riots three months earlier that killed nineteen
people. In mid-March, four Albanian children were playing by the banks of the fast moving river Ibar, near a Serbian village. The children entered the water, and three of them drowned. Immediately, rumors spread that the three children had been chased into the river by local Serb men with a dog. Speculation spread that that act was retaliation for the alleged gunning down of Serb children the previous summer by Albanian terrorists. Regardless, fury erupted in the Albanian community, with demonstrations throughout the country denouncing Serbian aggression. Those demonstrations quickly turned violent, and Serb homes and businesses became the targets of that violence. For the next three days, both Serb and Albanian mobs clashed, exchanging gunfire and tossing firebombs. More than 900 people were injured, 800 Serb houses, and 35 Orthodox churches were burned. Four thousand people lost their homes in three days.

These children had waited out the violence in their homes, nervously anticipating the arrival of an angry mob, but their homes were spared. The riots were over, and they had occurred for a simple reason, the children explained.

“The Albanians want to get rid of the Serbs so they can have Kosovo for themselves. That’s what they’ve always wanted.”

They told the story of the riots they survived with less outrage or animation than they told the story of the Battle of Kosovo that happened over six hundred years ago. It was as if the children had been there themselves in the summer of 1389, with their own heads on pikes, as if their own kingdom had been lost and the riots in 2004 were just aftershocks. Nothing was lost in March that had not already been lost on the medieval battlefield. In a sense they were right, as many see the Battle of Kosovo as the turning point when the Ottoman Empire took control of Kosovo, so that today Serbs are outsiders in their homeland. This
is the magic that nationalism works on children. It was not an abstract historical wrong these Serb children felt. They still felt the hurt that began six hundred years earlier. They felt the hurt in their parents’ humiliation, unable to find work in Kosovo. They felt it in the fear of Albanians, who surrounded them and penned them into the enclaves. They saw their current oppression as a result of their history, their ancient history. They made no mention of Serb discrimination against Albanians or of the campaign to cleanse Kosovo of the Albanians in 1998. It could well have been that they were kept somewhat ignorant of these events, as they would have been very small at the time. But Marko, at least, had lived in Pristina itself before the war. His family fled the anarchy and the reprisals against Serbs that swept the capital city after the NATO bombing allowed the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian guerilla organization, back into Pristina to take control of the country and put an end to the ethnic cleansing. For the Serb children, the myths of their people from centuries ago were as real to them as the armored vehicles on the road by their school today.

What to make of these children in Kosovo who grew so
moved by the telling of medieval history that they had to stop their game to make sure I understood their story, as if play would be impossible without this common narrative? What to make of these child soldiers in the Congo who roughhoused and laughed together only months after they had tried to kill each other? This was decidedly not how I imagined the children of war to be.

This project began when I was in college. It started with an insomniac night, when I watched reruns at three a.m. An ad for Save the Children came on, and I changed the channel. I
did not want to sponsor a child, or even see those pictures the ad would inevitably show me. There was little escape, however. They were everywhere. The children were all the same: they were fleeing and hungry, all rags and bones and pleading, innocent eyes. They were from Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia, Gaza, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Haiti, and Colombia. They were from the Congo and Sri Lanka. They were from Sierra Leone and Northern Ireland and from Israel. Where they came from hardly mattered to the story. The children were usually devoid of context. Seeing them I learned nothing about the conflict, the culture, or the child.

I had always thought of childhood as a kind of magical time, “a mythologized and privileged state,” as the Oxford anthropologist Jo Boyden calls it, kept separate from the workplace, the world of adults, the hardships of the adult world. I held a conviction that in order to have a healthy childhood, the young must be sheltered from the struggles they would later come to know as grown-ups, that the most essential conditions for “normal” development were safety and stability. I also began to observe the widespread belief that children were not competent to face many of the harsh realities of life. There was a conception that children, by the simple fact that they are children, are “innocent in the ways of the world and incompetent in it.”

Aside from the great pains that are taken to protect children from danger in the United States—look at the rubberizing of school playgrounds, the banning of tag, the flood of sanitizing gels in children’s knapsacks, as if germs and skinned knees are no longer acceptable parts of play, and, most pernicious, the banning of books, and blocking of the Internet in an effort to protect the innocence of children—there is a near total denial that children are protagonists in their own lives. When a young person gets into trouble, blame is spread between the parents,
the media, and any other cultural influence that is in vogue at the time: video games, loud music, fashion, MySpace. When a young person does something prodigious or remarkable—shows a selfless compassion by organizing a clothing drive for hurricane victims or, like twelve-year-old Ilana Wexler speaking at the Democratic National Convention, expresses a political opinion—it is seen as cute and somewhat unexpected, as if children were not usually aware of events in the world around them. However, it would take a supreme act of will for children in much of the world to be unaware of events around them.

Since World War II, children have become involved in wars in unprecedented ways. Jewish children were targeted by the Nazi death squads simply because they were children, and at the same time, Jewish youths fought with the partisans against Nazi occupation. Youths as young as twelve had to choose for themselves—pick up a gun and fight, or die in a gas chamber or ghetto. As David Rosen of Rutgers University notes, recruiters would often target orphans because their family ties had already been broken and they were less risk averse than children who still had family to lose. This practice is still in use today and is part of a well-developed doctrine of child-soldier use. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute observed that there are established “best-practices” and global teaching pathways for the training and use of child soldiers, involving elaborate propaganda programs and ingeniously cruel desensitization regimes. These groups of armed children go on to terrorize the civilian population, turning expected social roles upside down. From Liberian street gangs and Palestinian suicide bombers to Afghan child laborers and underage Congolese concubines, children play central roles in modern conflicts.

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 symboli
cally 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 Israel and Lebanon, one medical organization stated with alarm that a “disproportionately high” number of children were endangered by the conflict, at risk not only to the falling bombs, which killed three hundred children and injured thousands more, but due to serious health problems that would develop even after the fighting ceased. Without a doubt, during wars, children are victims.

But what of the myriad children who care for their cousins, brothers, sisters, and uncles in impossible conditions? In my
time doing research for this book, through innumerable soccer games and melted crayons and slow walks with young people, I had the privilege to meet children around the world who have survived and continue to survive unspeakable horrors and chronic deprivations. Each one of them has a unique genius for survival, physical and psychological, sometimes with the help of adults, often on their own, and many of them flourish: they manage to eat, to play and laugh, to help others, to find support when they need it, to make challenging decisions when they have to. It would be both presumptuous and meaningless to say that they did not have a “childhood” because they did not grow up in the rather unique safety and stability common to Western notions of child development.