"To kill the big rats, you have to kill the little rats.”: Children and War

McCamy Taylor

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Sat Jan-10-09 10:15 PM
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"To kill the big rats, you have to kill the little rats.”: Children and War

I. “Nits Make Lice “: Children as Targets

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." Jeannette Rankin

There has been war for as long as we have recorded history. The world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, Jericho, also has the world’s oldest wall, a sign that it needed protection from outside invaders. However, in the last fifty years, civilian and especially children’s deaths during wartime have risen at an alarming rate thanks to the changing nature of modern warfare.

From UNICEF’s website Children in War

The increasing number of child victims is primarily explained by the higher proportion of civilian deaths in recent conflicts. In the wars of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, only about half the victims were civilians.

In the later decades of this century the proportion of civilian victims has been rising steadily: in World War II it was two thirds, and by the end of the 1980s it was almost 90 per cent.5
This is partly a function of technology. Aerial bombardment has extended the potential battle zone to entire national territories. World War II saw a massive increase in indiscriminate killings, with the bombings of Coventry and Dresden, for example, and the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this pattern was repeated in the Viet Nam war, which is estimated to have cost 2.5 million lives.

A further cause of the rising death toll for civilians is that most contemporary conflicts are not between States, but within them. Rather than being set-piece battles between contending armies, these are much more complex affairs—struggles between the military and civilians, or between contending groups of armed civilians. They are as likely to be fought in villages and suburban streets as anywhere else. In this case, the enemy camp is all around, and distinctions between combatant and non-combatant melt away in the suspicions and confusions of daily strife. In 1994, the UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 13 countries had ongoing "complex emergencies" of this type, and it classified over 20 million people as "vulnerable"; it also listed 16 other countries with potential emergencies.6

Families and children are not just getting caught in the crossfire, they are also likely to be specific targets. This is because many contemporary struggles are between different ethnic groups in the same country or in former States. When ethnic loyalties prevail, a perilous logic clicks in. The escalation from ethnic superiority to ethnic cleansing to genocide, as we have seen, can become an irresistible process. Killing adults is then not enough; future generations of the enemy—their children—must also be eliminated. As one political commentator ex-pressed it in a 1994 radio broadcast before violence erupted in Rwanda, "To kill the big rats, you have to kill the little rats."

http://www.unicef.org/sowc96/1cinwar.htm

Speaking of the Rwanda genocide, here is the account of an 11 year old Tutsi boy, who witnessed his father being dragged out of the home and who was then shot. The killers then returned:

"I could feel blood coming from under my right shoulder and I did not know whether I was hit or not. I could not feel any pain then. My mind was occupied with the terror of being hacked to death."

"Suddenly the door burst open and they came in praising themselves for a good job done. I was closer to the door and they kicked me in my belly. It was painful but the thought of being severed alive with their machetes, made me stay as quiet as a mouse."

"One of them said: 'Let's make sure that he is dead with this'. I didn't move an inch, nor did I make any noise. They must have thought that I was dead."

"I just felt a very sharp pain on my leg and I must have passed out. I don't know for how long. But when I woke up, my mother was nursing my wounded leg. I was trying to look at the wound when I lost consciousness again."

http://www.historywiz.com/rwanda-eyewitness.htm

Here is the world's most famous child victim of war.

The United States has more than its share of atrocities. How many people at DU know that one of the “great victories” of the Union Army during the Civil War occurred in Colorado? No, the northern forces did not defeat confederate troops or liberate slaves. In the battle of Sand Creek, drunken union forces massacred a bunch of Cheyenne including women and children who had gathered to discuss a peace treaty under a flag of truce.

The colonel was as thourough as he was heartless. An interpreter living in the village testified, "THEY WERE SCALPED, THEIR BRAINS KNOCKED OUT; THE MEN USED THEIR KNIVES, RIPPED OPEN WOMEN, CLUBBED LITTLE CHILDREN, KNOCKED THEM IN THE HEAD WITH THEIR RIFLE BUTTS, BEAT THEIR BRAINS OUT, MUTILATED THEIR BODIES IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD." By the end of the one-sided battle as many as 200 Indians, more than half women and children, had been killed and mutilated.
While the Sand Creek Massacre outraged easterners, it seemed to please many people in Colorado Territory. Chivington later appeared on a Denver stage where he regaled delighted audiences with his war stories and displayed 100 Indian scalps, including the pubic hairs of women.
Chivington was later denounced in a congressional investigation and forced to resign. When asked at the military inquiry why children had been killed, one of the soldiers quoted Chivington as saying, "NITS MAKE LICE." Yet the after-the-fact reprimand of the colonel meant nothing to the Indians.

http://www.lastoftheindependents.com/sandcreek.htm

A Civil War memorial installed at the Colorado Capitol in 1909 listed the Sand Creek massacre as one of the Union's great victories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_Massacre

II.”Fearless Killing and Unthinking Obedience”: Children as Soldiers

Forcing children below the ages of 15 to enlist in the military or forcing them to participate in armed combat is a war crime. Forcing children below the age of 18 to enlist also violates international child labor laws.

However, in 1999 Amnesty International claimed that there were at least 300,000 children under eighteen actively involved in armed conflict in countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Uganda, Sri Lanka and Burma (Amnesty International, 1999). The increase in smaller, lighter weapons has made it easier for children to go into combat and fight alongside adults. Many others are not actual combatants but are used to plant or clear mines, as reconnaissance, as bearers and suppliers to the front line or as general ancillary workers, cooking, cleaning, keeping guard or delivering food.

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=167687

Cambodia---a country whose history was changed radically due to the illegal military incursion by the United States---has one of the most sordid histories of child abuse in war time. The Khmer Rouge broke up families and sent children to indoctrination camps where they were taught to become soldiers at extremely young ages. These children were encouraged to oppress and even murder adult Cambodians for crimes against the people. Here is the account of one such child soldier.

The first time Aki Ra laid a land mine he was five years old. "I could barely lift it," he says, with a gentle Cambodian lilt. But he did, to cheers and applause from Khmer Rouge guerrillas. "They told me how handsome I looked. I was so proud."
The former child soldier was barely three years old when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in 1975, a date etched in the minds of Cambodians as Year Zero. Two million people died during the reign of terror that followed.
Aki Ra was trained to kill before he learnt to form a sentence. He looked on as his relatives were marched to the killing fields; he was made to watch as the throats of his friends were slowly cut with the sinews of palm leaves. He set his first land mine along the K5 mine belt, 700km long and 400-500 meters wide, which divides Cambodia from Thailand.
He returned there recently to dig it up and disarm it. "It is one of many that I have come back to. I laid so many land mines during the conflict, I couldn't count."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/former-child-soldier-digs-up-mines-he-helped-lay-405660.html

No discussion of child soldiers would be complete without a mention of Hilter Youth . In addition to serving as a tool for indoctrination, Hitler Youth was a military reserve unit. During the final days of WWII, children as young as 12 were sent into combat by Germany.

By 1945, the Volkssturm was commonly drafting 12-year-old Hitler Youth members into its ranks. During the Battle of Berlin, Axmann's Hitler Youth formed a major part of the last line of German defense, and were reportedly among the fiercest fighters. Although the city commander, General Helmuth Weidling, ordered Axmann to disband the Hitler Youth combat formations; in the confusion, this order was never carried out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Youth

The scope of the problem is huge. Children are not merely the fighters of last resort. In modern times, they are sought after. Why? Why do combatants recruit skinny, weak little kids to do the job of adult fighters? According to an Amnesty International report, “both governments and armed groups use children because they are easier to condition into fearless killing and unthinking obedience” (“Hidden Scandal, Secret Shame: Torture and Ill-Treatment of Children,” 2000).

Children are a cheap and plentiful resource for military commanders in need of a steady troop supply to war zones. Their underdeveloped ability to assess danger means they are often willing to take risks and difficult assignments that adults or older teenagers will refuse. Children are more impressionable than adults, and depending on their age and background, their value systems and consciences are not yet fully developed.

How do the combatants turn ordinary children into killing machines?

Military commanders use proven tactics to produce unquestioning obedience in these homesick children while transforming them into killers. New recruits are often forced to kill or perpetrate various acts of violence against others, including strangers, escapees or even members of their own village or family. Coercing the children to harm or kill people they know has the added benefit of discouraging them from attempting escape, as they know they will no longer be welcome back home.
Some groups also practice cannibalism, making young recruits drink the blood or eat the flesh of their victims. While recruits are often told “It will make you stronger,” Wessells argues that the real motivation is to “force children to quiet their emotional reactions to seeing people killed and demolish their sense of the sanctity of life and their tendency to show respect for the dead.”
In addition, drugs are administered to deaden the effects of conscience: amphetamines, crack cocaine, palm wine, brown-brown (cocaine mixed with gun powder), marijuana and tranquilizers help disengage the child’s actions from any sense of reality. Children who refuse to take the drugs are beaten or killed, according to Amnesty International. One rehabilitation camp director told Wessells that recruits “would do just about anything that was ordered” when they were on drugs.
Revenge is also used as a motivator. Ishmael Beah’s commanders told him to “visualize the enemy, the rebels who killed your parents, your family, and those who are responsible for everything that has happened to you.”

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=6684

The effects of this on the developing mind can be profound. In the August 1, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), their annual medicine and war issue, a research paper by Bayer et al called Association of Trauma and PTSD Symptoms With Openness to Reconciliation and Feelings of Revenge Among Former Ugandan and Congolese Child Soldiers studies 169 former child soldiers. They found that those with PTSD were less open to reconciliation and had an increased desire for revenge. One third of the children had significant PTSD symptoms. Almost all the children reported witnessing murderers, being beaten, and about half of them reported murdering someone themselves, while another quarter reported being raped. There was no association between individual experience and the degree of PTSD suffered. The authors conclude that “posttraumatic stress might be an important factor influencing post conflict situations and may contribute to the cycle of violence found in war-torn regions.”

Treatment is possible:

According to Christian Children’s Fund, a leading nonprofit organization involved in psychosocial interventions including the rehabilitation of former child soldiers, it can take as long as three years to be reintegrated into society. Beah spent eight months in a rehab facility before being placed with an uncle. It took him two months just to withdraw from the drugs, and several months passed before he could sleep at night without medication. It took even longer for him to recall early childhood memories as he grappled with flashbacks of his war experiences. As he gradually learned to trust adults again, he marveled at the workers’ patience and their refusal to give up on their hardened and antagonistic charges. Beah recalls that his nurse Esther looked at him with the “inviting eyes and welcoming smile that said I was a child.” After being stabbed, beaten or otherwise mistreated by the children, the staff would tell them, “None of these things are your fault.” It annoyed him at first, but he eventually came to believe it. He writes, “It lightened my burdensome memories and gave me strength to think about things.”

http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=6684

We know that the victims of domestic violence are at increased risk for growing up to become violent themselves. Children who were snatched from their homes and forced to kill or be killed, beaten, raped, terrorized----what are the chances that they will grow up to become violent adults? How much of the world’s present violence is due to our lack of action twenty or thirty years ago, when we failed to protect the children of that generation who are now adults, waging wars across the globe?

Even after Cambodia was liberated in 1979 by the Vietnamese, there remained a ‘residual fear of children’ in the country (Boyden and Gibbs, 1997, p. 98).

http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=167687

III. Children as "Collateral Damage"

War disrupts everything---family life, social programs, moral values, public health infrastructures, economic systems. The most vulnerable people, the ones who will suffer first if you sgatter the delicate balance are the children.

From the same issue of JAMA cited above Child Maltreatment in Enlisted Soldiers’ Families During Combat Related Deployment by Gibbs et al. The authors studied military families with a history of documented child mistreatment (abuse). They found that the rates of mistreatment rose when the soldiers were on combat-related deployment. This was almost entirely due to elevated levels of child mistreatment by civilian female spouses, with neglect being four times higher. There could be many reasons for this, including economic factors such as the mother now being forced to work, emotional stress such as worry over the safety of the absent spouse or a breakdown in the normal family structure with the disappearance of one parent or maladaptive behavior from the parent in response to a child who is acting out.

Here is a link which describes how war, especially the loss of a parent to military duty can affect a child:
http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/children_war_general.aspx

Children who have a family member in the military, but who don't live near a military base, may feel isolated. Children of reserve members called to active duty may not know others in the same situation. Such children may feel jealous of friends' undisturbed families and may strike out at signs of normalcy around them. Another group of children who may feel isolated are dependents of military families who have accompanied a remaining parent back to a hometown or who are staying with relatives while both parents are gone. Not only do these children experience separation from parents, but they also experience the loss of familiar faces and surroundings.

This problem can affect even families in industrialized nations. Plus, they have to worry about the permanent loss of a parent through death or divorce or a parent returning home with physical or mental disability. Children in developing countries have more to fear from war.

When refugee families are forced to leave their homes to escape wartime violence, they are at risk for illness and death from disease, because of lack of access to health care and proper food and because of unsanitary living conditions. “(A)ccording to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Conflict Data Project, and the principal indirect causes of death in complex emergencies in developing countries are malnutrition, diarrheal diseases, acute respiratory infections (most often pneumonia), and malaria. By most accounts, these few diseases account for 60 to 95 percent of all deaths.” Malnutrition lowers resistance to these diseases. Children as especially vulnerable.

With some exceptions, children have had consistently higher mortality rates, two to three times higher than the adult rates in emergency settings, particularly in the early phases of a crisis. When refugees from Ethiopia settled in Sudan in the mid-1980s, more than one-half of the deaths occurred in children under five years of age. When northern Iraq’s Kurds fled to the border with Turkey in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, two-thirds (64 percent) of all deaths occurred among the 17 percent of the population less than five years old. Mortality during the first month of the Goma crisis was high in all age groups since all were susceptible to cholera, the leading cause of death in that emergency. Sadly, however, the high adult mortality resulted in many orphans, for whom little care was available. These children were taken to makeshift, understaffed “orphanages,” and mortality rates among these children soared to unprecedented levels.

http://www.harvardir.org/articles/1326/2/

Orphaned children are at risk for death, forced military service or child slavery.

The world’s humanitarian organizations attempt to do what they can, setting up shelters, providing food and medical assistance, drawing attention to the suffering of the innocent. However, this effort is like trying to catch water in a sieve. From the above link.

In the end, however, humanitarian relief to those caught in warfare will always arrive too late. The business of war is taking lives and destroying societies, not saving them. Access to war’s “innocent bystanders” has become increasingly difficult even for those who have the appropriate expertise. Relief workers have themselves increasingly been targeted, and humanitarianism has become at times a high-risk profession. Relief agencies can at best prevent a bad situation from getting worse, and through increased professionalization of the field, they are getting better at this all the time. Still, they can never make the situation good for the civilians who lose homes, relatives, family members, or even their own lives in wartime.
Preventing the unnecessary loss of civilian life is the job of politicians, who have failed all too often. The world has stood by and watched as one genocide after another has unfolded. Although there is always great sympathy for the survivors, and although humanitarian assistance is frequently, but not always, forthcoming, the effect is, at best, that of applying a bandage to a gaping wound. The most important lesson to learn for the future—one that has already been learned but forgotten many times in the past—is that war and public health are fundamentally incompatible pursuits.

Then there are the children who die in battle, because the battlefields are now cities and towns and even houses where families are known to live.

It’s no different with respect to President Bush’s war on Iraq and the resulting occupation, which has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Iraqi people, including countless children. (The Pentagon has long had a policy of not keeping count of the number of Iraqi people, including children, it kills.) In the minds of U.S. officials, the deaths and maiming of all those Iraqi people, including the children, while perhaps unfortunate “collateral damage,” have, in fact, been worth it.

That’s why U.S. officials gave nary a thought to the death of that five-year-old girl who was bombed into oblivion with the bomb that did the same to Zarqawi. The child’s death was “worth it” because the bomb also killed a terrorist, which U.S. officials believe, brings the Middle East another step closer to peace and freedom.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0606g.asp

Note that the UN chastised both sides in the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 2006, telling them that targeting civilian areas was a "war crime" which would be prosecuted.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3278907,00.html

No one dares to tell the United States the same thing, and so it blows up a family in Afghanistan and then it can not understand why U.S. military forces commit rape and murder against a family in Iraq. The U.N.'s policy against targeting civilians is mostly rhetoric, its threats ring hollow, when the world's most powerful nation sets an entirely different example, one which says that children are expendable.

However, we know that the industrialized nations of the world are sensitive to public opinion, even if they do not actually care about civilian deaths or the deaths of children. We know this, because in recent years countries like the United States, China and others have taken to care to keep the press away when they know that are going to be killing civilians, especially when their targets will include such "innocents" as children, priests and others who might cause their own citizens to question the morality of the war. These nations do not want to see anything like this...

in relation to any military endeavor of theirs ever again. This is the human face of war.

IV. Save the Children: Prevent War by Ending Poverty

In my last journal, I make a case that one of the causes of war in modern times is economic injustice---aka poverty.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/356

Groups of people living in poverty in a world in which others have more than they can ever possibly use feel cheated, angry, despondent, suicidal. I discuss the medical effects of poverty and wealth disparity which include depression, increased tendency to commit acts of violence (even against members of one's own group, reckless and self destructive behaviors including suicide. In addition, malnutrition, exposure to toxic chemicals, lack of education, PTSD and disease can cause physical problems that affect behavior.

Check out these world poverty statistics:

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats

Note that half of the world's children live in poverty. Everyday, 30,000 children die of poverty. If your group is one of those which witnesses its children dying from the effects of poverty on a regular basis, war, even war that involves the use of child soldiers or children as targets, may not seem particularly cruel. What is cruelty when your own children die for no reason and the world does nothing and does not care? One quarter of children in developing countries are underweight. 72 million school age children will not be able to attend school.

Note also that 20 percent of the world's people own 3/4 of the world's wealth. How often do those 20% think about the starving children whose parents also grew up in poverty and whose children (if they survive childhood) will grow up in poverty? Once a year? Once in a lifetime? What does this indifference teach those who live in poverty stricken countries? Marx would have said that it teaches them to fight their oppressors, however all too often those who oppress are thousands of miles away in the developed countries of Europe, Asia and North America. In fact, poverty leads the poor to fight among themselves for the scarps necessary to survive.

Dr. Susan Rice, President-elect Obama's nominee to be the US ambassador to the U.N. cites statistics that show an association between poverty and civil war in this document:

http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/rice/poverty_civilwar.pdf

While association is not causality, the relationship suggests that people whose lives are most tenuous are also the most likely to go to war within their own country over what resources are available. As poverty worsens, the risk for civil war increases. Low education and a high proportion of young people such as you would see with low access to birth control and low life expectancy also increase the risk of civil war. Unfortunately, United States policy in recent years has been to arm combatants----producing and selling weaponry is one of the things we are good at---but avoid providing financial aid or health care or education or birth control for families in need. She cites failed attempts to bring democracy to Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq without doing anything to change underlying economic ills and speculates that had an effort been made to alleviate the poverty in these regions instead, perhaps war in these areas could have been prevented.

For example, we have spent almost $600 billion dollars to wage war in Iraq, but does that country have a decent public health infrastructure? How is the water supply? How is the electricity? The roads? In 2006, Iraq's human development infrastructure indicators were rated as being among the lowest in the Middle East after three years of US occupation, even though the country was among the most advanced in the Middle East under Saddam.

http://www.cfr.org/publication/10971/

Before the invasion, we heard people pleading for the lives of the half million or million children who were said to be dead (or dying) under Saddam. One of the reasons for going to war with Iraq was to save the children. Now, no one wants to keep count of the civilians who have been displaced or who have died.

Any effort to change current U.S. policy will be met with resistance on several fronts. U.S. weapons manufacturers and dealers do well when the world is war torn. They do not want to see peace. U.S., European and other industrialized world companies which exploit the natural resources of other countries prefer to deal with impoverished citizens who will work diamond mines (or polish the gems), drill for oil and do other forms of manual labor without having to worry that their workers will form unions or ask for wages increases or resort to strikes or collective bargaining. They also like to pay a few bribes to dictators rather than offering a fair rate for the natural wealth which they are plundering. So, third world poverty means good business and fat pocketbooks for industrial world capitalists.

For this reason, the corporations have created a culture which glorifies war. They have gone so far as to label the process of systematically killing other people as patriotic or a "holy" act or "the only sensible solution" (Realpolitik) and those who object to it are condemned as traitors or blasphemers or imbeciles. As the Recession worsens and maybe even turns into a Depression, I expect to hear Republicans and more than a few Democrats insist that wars throughout the world are good for the US economy and should be encouraged (or at least not discouraged, since that might cause job losses in some U.S. city) but that financial aid to poverty stricken nations is something that we just can not afford.

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism." MLK Jr