Songs of childhood - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 7: The Lure of Fundamentalism
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Nick Earls
BUT MANY CHILDREN BROUGHT UP IN ENVIRONMENTS LIKE THAT don't become terrorists, and that's a phenomenon at least as interesting as the children who do. Why don't they?
For a start, not every child brought up in the same street at the same time has an identical set of influences. Beyond that, in any sizeable group of children you'll find some who take on views with more fervour, some who get a bigger buzz out of taking risks or inflicting damage, some with a greater need to be part of the pack or to have the respect that is sometimes given to those with the power to do harm, some who simply face a lower tolerance of boredom or frustration.
It's probably normal, in dysfunctional environments such as these, for some children to grow into terrorists and some not to.
But as far as I can see, this is not how we tend to think about terrorism. I wonder if we have a tendency to think that fanaticism and terrorism are only the province of late-adolescent and adult males, as though someone takes healthy male teenagers and turns them this way when adulthood beckons – persuades them, brainwashes them, manipulates them, drugs them, promises them a better kind of heaven. No doubt this happens, but to think it's the only way disregards childhood and the effect of a childhood lived in a place where such views and behaviours dominate and are part of the fabric of life.
At any time, there are about 300,000 child soldiers fighting in conflicts around the world as members of national armies, opposition forces, militias and underground groups. Most of them are teenagers, but the number includes boys and girls as young as seven. The website of the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (www.child-soldiers.org) quotes a military commander in Congo as saying that children "make good fighters because they're young and want to show off. They think it's all a game, so they're fearless."
Many child soldiers are, of course, far from fearless. A significant number are forced into becoming soldiers, some through being kidnapped from their schools or homes. Others are driven to it by hunger, poverty or abuse at home. This is reflected in a study of demobilised Sudanese child soldiers, in which the children listed their needs as peace, food and the chance to go to school safely.
Some children, though, find a sense of purpose and belonging when they take up arms. On top of that, children can prove easier than adults to condition into fearless killing, and the lightweight weapons now available allow even small children to kill efficiently in combat. The first United States military casualty in Afghanistan was reportedly shot by a child.
Before the war in 2003, Iraq trained boys and girls as young as 10 in combat techniques and small-arms use. According to 1998 estimates, the Kurdish Workers Party had 3000 child soldiers, with the youngest aged seven.
When Australia joined the US and UK – and Kurdish militias – in a war with Iraq, we sent the SAS. We shouldn't assume everyone else did the same. It's a mistake to make assumptions about the conduct of a war based on our perceptions of our own army and its conduct. In the place where the war is actually fought, it's almost never as neat as one group of well-trained and well-equipped consenting adult troops coming up against another.
Armies have attacked school groups because they have mistaken them for child guerilla units. In Australia, it can be hard to imagine soldiers finding themselves in circumstances where they might come to think that way.
Anna Burns talked at the writers' festival in Perth in 2003 about being a child in Belfast in the early 1970s. Her novel No Bones (HarperCollins, 2002) is largely set there and it begins when her central character is about seven, in 1969. Having avoided the "Irish writer" sessions at writers' festivals for my whole career, I only ended up in hers because I happened to be in mid-conversation with someone who walked in there.
In the early '70s the British army patrolled the streets where Anna Burns lived, and she was afraid of them. One day, when she was nine and small for her age, she turned a street corner and almost collided with a soldier. It was the soldier who jumped back and, from the look on his face, she knew he was afraid of her as well. For the first time, she realised that a nine-year-old might be a threat to a soldier.
Stopping the use of child combatants is about stopping the abuses of children that lead to them taking up arms. Most obviously, this includes the threats and abductions that force many children into becoming soldiers, as well as addressing factors such as poverty and other deprivation that can drive them to it. But it also includes addressing the environments in which children can grow up wanting to be soldiers – wanting to define themselves in their communities as people who are devoting their lives to the cause and who would die for it.
In setting out to address this, we need to remember than even these children are children. Child soldiers are also victims of conflict, even when they are willing perpetrators.
Many children drawn into conflict find themselves there because of dreadful circumstances, but some fight because the seeds of fanaticism are sown early in life, and there are adults prepared to exploit that. When we think of the fanaticism that underlies terrorism, we should remember this.
AT LEAST ONE REVIEWER OF THE THOMPSON GUNNER SAID SOMETHING IN THE NOVEL – some part of the story-line in which an eight-year-old girl in Northern Ireland is drawn towards taking a side – couldn't have happened. Several people who knew Belfast then but who now live in Australia have told me that that response would come no matter how convincingly I wrote the book. All of them stopped talking about Northern Ireland not long after migrating, because the stories they had to tell, though taken from their lives, were not believable here – not from somewhere like Northern Ireland, not from the UK, not from a country where most people look like most of us and speak English and say they're a Christian of one kind or another.
We want these stories to be untrue. We want them to be impossible in a place that seems not unlike our own. We need to believe that people who do bad things are as dissimilar to us as possible. And, if we believe that, we risk believing that people who seem different to us do bad things. We create demons; we burn mosques.
Perhaps unprecedented global communication should have been a moderating influence, but it doesn't seem to be. Hatreds, fears and the actions and messages of terrorists may all be amplified by news channels that give us 24 hours of pictures and stories, while ultimately overwhelming us with pictures and only ever giving us fragments of stories.
At the same time, other footage can be used to amplify the messages of extremists to their own people. For the first time, we live in a world in which billions of people have access to news as it's happening. All these billions of people also have access to the propaganda that looks like news, sometimes persuasively so, and we can expect all sides in any conflict to use propaganda. Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush are each seen to embody evil in different parts of the world, and each claims a God-given kind of righteousness that leads others to sacrifice their lives.
That's how conflict has always been. There must be countless conflicts over the years in which each side has been reliably told that God is with them and the others eat their own babies – but perhaps the pervasiveness of television allows it to work differently now.
At the same time as this evolution in media coverage, we face a kind of maximum terrorism that is very difficult to counter. Instead of selecting military and infrastructure targets, some terrorists seem to have worked out that their terrorism comes with a different level of terror if they set out to kill large numbers of people who have no direct connection with their issues – commuters on buses, office workers, school children. We are particularly appalled by acts perpetrated against children, and it appears that that might now make them a target.
The siege in Beslan would have been an atrocity whatever the age of its victims, but would we have felt the same if it had involved a factory instead of a school? Would we have felt the same if it had been a munitions factory? Are we so used to terrorism that this is what it now takes to truly shock us and claim the front pages of our newspapers?
Children have always been victims of terrorism though, and of war – killed in crossfire or playing with unexploded bombs or as possible combatants, as well as being victims in far greater numbers in indirect ways. In No Bones, every nine-year-old in Northern Ireland in 1971 has to write a peace poem, but the central character, Amelia, is unable to do it because the concept of peace is too unfamiliar and she doesn't know anyone else who would know anything about it, either.
THE OTHER DEVELOPMENT IN TERRORISM, AND ONE THAT IS SOMETIMES LINKED to fundamentalism, is the terrorists' changed plans for their own futures. There is a difference between putting your life on the line for a cause and planning to sacrifice your life for it. When terrorists planted bombs and left the train, the empty briefcase was the sign that something was wrong. When terrorists took hostages, a big part of the negotiations used to be about the terrorists' escape.
It may be that counter-terrorism plans were based on the idea that terrorists would have exit strategies, so no one expected planes to fly into buildings. No one expected the terrorist to be the bomb. The scope for terrorism increases if no exit plan is needed, and it increases if the aim is to do the maximum possible indiscriminate harm.
Terrorism hasn't yet shown us what it can really do with chemicals or radioactive isotopes. It hasn't yet brought us the bombs that blow up the pumps that keep water out of the London Underground. It hasn't yet brought us the cohort of fanatics who inoculate themselves with ebola virus and then spend their last days in the transit lounges of the world's airports, letting loose an epidemic. But if it does, what war will have us ready for it?
That's why we need more than a war to counter terrorism. It's why we need to accept that terrorists are made, not born, and that they can come from anywhere. It's why we need to look at what it takes to make a terrorist, and we need to work on creating a world that presents its children with better things to believe in, and better opportunities – a world in which fewer people seek to give their lives purpose or meaning through killing and dying. But that will take gifted and committed leadership. It will take time and subtlety, and a preparedness for nations to address some of the world's great imbalances more conclusively. It will take a preparedness to listen. And, first, it will require us to start asking the right questions.
Such an approach should be seen as strength, not weakness. It is not appeasement, nor is it a replacement for attempting to bring to justice people who commit barbaric acts. We will wage our war against terrorism – that course of action appears set. But for the sake of children in schools, commuters on buses, workers in offices – for the sake of us all – it can't be all we do. ♦