When Elephants Fight (5 page)

For over 250,000 children all over the world, army barracks are home and military commanders are family. These are no ordinary children. They are child soldiers.

There is still no universally accepted definition for what a child soldier is, but international human rights organizations, including UNICEF, agree that a child soldier is a boy or girl under the age of eighteen who willingly joins or is forced to become a member of a government army or rebel-armed military. These child soldiers are commanded to perform a variety of duties, including armed combat, laying mines and
explosives, scouting, cooking and labor, and are often victims of sexual slavery and exploitation.

Today, children are directly participating in conflicts in over 20 countries worldwide, with more than 100,000 children on the front-lines in Africa; most prominently in Sudan and Uganda, where it is estimated that the Lord's Resistance Army has abducted 50,000 children and forced them into conflict.

While thousands of children are indeed abducted or recruited by force, many more join voluntarily. However, they often enlist as a means of survival: joining because of extreme poverty, lack of education or family support, along with the promise of a steady income, status and power, which most often never comes. The military is seen as their only opportunity to get ahead during a time of unbelievable desperation. The majority of child soldiers are between the ages of 14 to 18, but there are children as young as 9 years of age who have been forced into conflict.

For those not familiar with the child soldier phenomenon, it's difficult to understand the value of an army of young children. When we hear the word “soldier” we automatically think big, strong, adult men. However, with lightweight, easy-to-use firearms readily available—big and strong are no longer necessary. Even a young child can carry, and use, a gun.

Along with being able to handle guns and ammunition, children are also seen as both physically and emotionally vulnerable. They can be easily intimidated. In the case of abduction, it's commonplace for one of the abducted children in a group to be killed. This example sends a message to all of the others that if you try to escape or if you do not obey your commanders, you too will be killed. This is the “initiation.” In fact, children are even sometimes forced to commit atrocities in their home villages, against friends and family, putting them in an even more desperate situation because they can never return home.

Child soldiers are often considered “cheaper” to keep. They eat less, they are more resilient and need less medical care (or at the very least are provided less care) and are much more predictable in their actions.

There is much global talk of nuclear conflict and “weapons of mass destruction.” Lt. General (Ret.) Romeo Dallaire, commander of the UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 and now a Canadian senator, uses that same language when talking about the use of child soldiers. “Children have become the new weapons system,” he explains. “They're not high-tech, but they are weapons of
mass destruction. How do you fight a war against children?”

Fires are a constant threat to families in the internal displacement camps. The tarped huts are evidence of recent fires in the region
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That question alone, is a moral dilemma that may never have any answers.

Human rights organizations worldwide are working with the United Nations and individual countries to end the use of child soldiers. Much work is also being done to support child soldiers after the end of their time in conflict. Regardless of the length of time as active participants in war, the trauma is life-altering. The current stream of support is through Demobilization, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) programs that are focused on providing psycho-social support, along with education, training and skills for these children so they can make an attempt at life back home in their communities.

While these DDR programs do exist, there are too few of them worldwide. And when they do exist, they lack the resources necessary to provide for the needs of these now incredibly vulnerable returnees. More often than not, these children are left on their own to cope with a childhood lost and a level of trauma few can even begin to comprehend. These soldiers are above all else, simply children, who continue to suffer from the effects of the wars they have been forced to fight.

Annu woke to the sounds of gunfire. It wasn't unusual, and that was part of the tragedy of her life. War was all she'd known. Since the time of her birth her country had been at civil war, and conflict was as much a part of her life as the hugs of her mother.

But today it seemed different. It wasn't just a few shots and it didn't seem to be stopping. In fact it was getting more frequent and, more frighteningly, louder and closer. She knew she had to act.

She rolled from her bed—the bed she shared with her mother. She called out for her mother, but there was no answer. She was alone. She knew her mother could have gone to the market or was at the home of a friend or family member. While she was worried about being alone, it wasn't that unusual; Annu wasn't a baby, she was almost seven years old. She was old enough to know that she needed to seek cover, not run out to find her mother. Her mother would take shelter and she had to do the same—but where?

She tried to stop her heart from pounding so loud. She tried to slow her breathing and her thoughts. She needed to listen. She needed to think. She listened for the sounds of the gunfire. She had enough experience to know that it was guns or rifles, and not coming from a helicopter or aircraft. That was important. What type of gunfire determined where she should flee. If it was fire coming from the sky she would head to the bunker, the little covered trench behind her house; but if it was coming from the ground she had to get out of the house but avoid the bunker. It was hidden from the sky, but any soldiers walking along the ground would easily find it—and find her.

Annu knew she had to find a place to hide. For a few seconds
she stood there, frozen in place, thinking about her mother, hoping she was safe, but also thinking about where she needed to go to find safety as well. She realized that she couldn't help her mother, but there was somebody she could help. Lying in the corner of the small room, sleeping on an old blanket, was her cat, Kutti. Kutti wasn't very big. It was just a gray-and-white ball of fur, but she loved Annu and Annu loved her cat. She grabbed Kutti in her arms and ran outside.

Annu on her 5th birthday
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Annu's house was small. Her parents had planned to make a bigger house, but then the war broke out. There wasn't any point in building something that might be destroyed or damaged one day. A larger house would have to wait until there was peace. They'd been waiting a long time.

The property itself wasn't much bigger than the house. It was rocky rough ground, and they couldn't plant crops. Only the Palmyra trees grew. It was the leaves of these trees that formed the roof of their house and the fence that surrounded the property. Among the trees was a gigantic haystack. Her grandparents, who lived just a few houses away, had left the stack there to
feed their livestock. This was the place Annu would hide.

Annu and her first cousins. Annu sits in the middle wearing a pink dress. Six of her cousins now live in Canada, the rest are in India, London, England, and Sri Lanka (Colombo)
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She made her way to the haystack, Kutti in her arms. The haystack sat closer to the road than her home, but she hoped it would be safe. Any soldiers walking down her drive would go to the house and then to the bunker to search.

As she walked she stroked the cat and quietly talked to it. Maybe she was trying to reassure Kutti. Probably she was trying to reassure herself. The gunfire got louder and louder. Whoever was out there was waging a battle. She knew on one side would be members of the Tamil Tigers and on the other either government troops or maybe members of the Indian Army—people who had been sent in to create peace but now were just another part of the conflict. If the Tamil fighters won and drove away the other side, she knew she'd be safe. She hoped she'd be safe. A stray bullet, once fired, didn't ask who it hit or who it killed. Civilians, little children, didn't have to be the intended target to be the ones killed. She knew the stories. She knew the victims. Adults, women, old people and children, even babies, had been caught in the deadly cross fire and had their lives ended.

Hiding behind the haystack she felt safer but scared and vulnerable. It was such a big pile that it certainly hid her from anybody passing on the road, but she knew that hay wouldn't stop a bullet. She also knew that she was simply behind the stack and that a soldier walking through the front
gate and down the driveway would see her. She needed to burrow into the stack of hay.

Kutti was just a stray. Annu wasn't sure if she found the cat or the cat found her. What she was sure of was how much she loved the cat, and she knew it cared for her too. They had a special bond, and Annu loved to stroke the cat as much as the cat loved to be stroked. When it saw Annu it would run toward her, perhaps hoping for a small treat that sometimes came, but more just wanting to be petted, to be shown love and affection. In some ways cats are very much like people.

But now, as she tried to burrow into the straw, her cat was not happy. It clawed at her arms, trying to get free. And as determined as Kutti was to get free, Annu was determined to keep it safe.

“Hold still!” she whispered at the cat as it continued to struggle. “If the soldiers see you, they will shoot you!”

Annu didn't know the soldiers. Whether they were Indian—and Hindu, like most of the Tamils—or government soldiers, she only knew to fear them. She and her mother had been taken from buses and searched and questioned and their identification checked. And she would just stand there, clutch her mother's hand, bury her face in her side, hoping that the stories she'd heard weren't about to happen to her— people taken to jail by the soldiers to be tortured or killed, or shot right there at the side of the road.

She'd heard the story of a little boy, no older than her, who was shot dead because the soldiers heard him sing a song celebrating the Tamil Tigers. She hadn't been there but she'd heard the stories. Everybody knew. Even small children. There were always lots of stories.

What she had seen with her own eyes were people being yelled at, pushed in the back with guns, pulled off the buses and put in the backs of jeeps to be taken to places she had no way of knowing—was it jail...was it torture...was it to be killed? Her imagination was left to fill in the blanks. She had heard the cries of her neighbors and her family members, crying over the death of somebody they loved who was now gone. One story stood out vividly in her memory.

A neighbor, a good friend of the family, had come back from the funeral of her daughter. The daughter had been a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Annu had remembered the fighting the day before, and it was in that battle that the neighbor's daughter had been killed. Only a few had been allowed to see the body before the funeral because the head
had been severed. The whole village had come to the neighbor's home to pay respect to the family. And all night, long after dark had fallen and the people had gone home, Annu could hear the mother crying. She thought that the mother sounded like a wounded animal. It went on and on, keeping Annu awake. It was the last sound she heard before she finally managed to get to sleep.