MY SOMALI MINDERS and I sit in a row on the edge of the pier like serried crows on a high wire. It is hot. I have no energy and not much desire to do anything constructive—for what purpose? There is some gunfire from somewhere across the water. Gunfire has become akin to chronic pain—I am not aware of it anymore; I am just too exhausted to be impressed. These events that approach us, slam into us helter-skelter, have a cauterizing effect. I know what is lacking: time to breathe, time for reflection. I can forget about being a journalist—that went out the window not long after our arrival. I have become involved, not the way I expected, but involved. My nerves are raw and at the same time I feel dulled. I play out a role in this Dantesque set piece while constantly staying alert that I don’t walk into someone’s bullet, yet maybe—maybe not much caring if I do. I wonder if aid workers elsewhere experience this ineluctable ambivalence toward survival. Any one of the events here would make an indelible, possibly traumatic mark in its singularity, but cumulatively, they blend into one continuous and barely manageable bad dream. Perhaps that is healthy.
There was another problem at the airport earlier today, one that might be the final straw. Another Somali/UN misunderstanding. When the UN is in town everyone is supposed to get rich. When they don’t, it is a misunderstanding. Baudelaire had it right: The world revolves on misunderstanding. The Somalis live off it.
From their lofty perch in Nairobi and for reasons unknown to us, the brains at Unicef are arranging to use an old American DC-707 to airlift supplies into Kismayo, much of which I, and whoever else is sent to drive the boats, will be delivering upriver. With its four engines and huge wingspan, a landing at our forlorn little international airport seems improbable. Andrew has asked Nairobi to arrange for the use of the less expensive, more compact Russian-built Anotov, which can carry nearly as big a payload. I remember seeing it on the tarmac in Nairobi, large and silent, apparently just awaiting orders.
For motives political or otherwise—the Anotov is the Ukrainian contribution to this alleged flood emergency—Unicef remains firm on its decision. However, before the great white American elephant can land, all the thorn trees and bush have to be cleared away from the sides of the landing strip, because its giant wings will extend well out over the scrub. General Morgan was given the $700 contract, and he ordered his militia to get it done. His militia has “subcontracted” their Bantu slaves to do the work at gunpoint while they sit in the shade of the airport warehouse, chewing miraa.
The work started three days ago, yet only ten percent of the bush has been cleared and now Morgan’s militia is demanding payment. Bravo Delta and Alpha Kilo won’t have any of it and refuse to pay until the job is completed. The militia is mad.
If this is not trouble enough, the miraa plane is overdue. Kismayo waits in the noonday heat and it is a dangerous time.
Some garbled voices overriding one another in the one-way traffic roll out of the radio.
“Negative copy, whoever is transmitting,” Bravo Delta says.
“This is Sierra Sierra. I repeat, we are being held inside the airport by a Technical.” It sounds as if he is taking it in his stride.
“So what’s new?”
Another voice announces: “I also got a Technical holding me outside the terminal.” It is Mwalimo. “That gun is pointing through the windscreen at me!”
“Shit,” Sierra Sierra says. “Looks like we may have a ‘security situation’ here,” words that indicate that either kidnapping or shooting is possible.
I look down at one boat crammed with emergency rations and water. She’s topped up and ready to go, and I wonder if there is anything I’ve missed. The sleek little craft, which I am grudgingly beginning to accept, dances upon the harbor chop, pulling at its restraining lines like a horse at the post.
The radio, usually busy with requests for transportation, inquiries about rotation schedules, arrangements of meetings, goes unusually quiet. Waiting for the invitation to a poker game, I seek shelter from an unrelenting sun in the shade of the guardhouse with some of the militiamen. I ask one of the young soldiers if I may hold his assault rifle. It is a daring move, but the lad proudly hands it over.
The stock is wood and not plastic, an indication that it is an older model. There are scratchy whittlings of stars, an Islamic crescent, and a few things in Arabic carved crudely into the wood. It is universal; in the West, schoolchildren creatively deface their schoolbooks, desks, school bags, walls, and even subway trains with personal totems, brands, and markings. Here in Somalia they disfigure their guns.
Frustrated, bored, and a bit out of sorts, I tire of waiting for word of a poker game and I decide to return to the Unicef compound.
At the port’s main gate, the militia soldiers stoop to window level to inspect those within the UN rig; with qat-stained grins, they return my thumbs-up and shout, “Diep maleh!” and wave us through.
The last barricade before entering town is more formidable than the others, more solid than the one at the airport; razor wire, steel girders, and a scattering of heavy artillery casings block the laterite road. The roadblock appears unmanned. Anything out of the usual fires the adrenaline, and this unmanned roadblock is unusual.
Harun honks impatiently. I sense my guards tighten.
There is some movement in the shadows of the portal of the cement blockhouse. A little boy not more than ten years old emerges from out of the darkness and marches toward the car, cradling an AK-47. He wears a full-length yellow smock, torn at the shoulder; the rip exposes his brown baby skin. His clean round face and his soft eyes display that precious naïveté of youth—he looks like a nice kid.
With a charming attempt to snarl he orders us out of the car. My guards and Harun look at one another and laugh. A sudden black cloud of anger twists his little-boy face; his small soft eyes narrow with the petulance of a child who is not getting his way. He is not going to be humiliated. And he has a gun.
He steps up closer. He jabs his rifle into Harun’s face; the barrel presses the flesh of his cheek. Harun secretly reaches for the door handle. The boy realizes he is vulnerable and backs away. His gun is leveled at the driver’s head. He has been trained. The boy squeaks something in Somali, and Harun shuts off the car’s engine. Sweat begins to form on my unshaven face.
With measured calm that underscores the danger, Harun tells the boy to stop horsing around and let us pass. He is still not quite sure whether to take this kid seriously.
The child soldier responds: He jerks back the stiff cocking spring of his rifle with his small fist; the final, cold metallic clack defines the moment. Although the proud Somalis have hair-trigger tempers, it often does not get this far; much of the gun-toting is posturing. When a Somali cocks his gun, however, the talking has usually ended—it is the penultimate act.
The boy is staring at Harun with the sort of face seldom seen. This is not the face of a little boy in the throes of a temper tantrum but a face we create in the latter stages of a nightmare when our imagination conjures the unimaginable: the innocent face of a beautiful child that is suddenly masked by the contorted, out-of-control fury of an old man. The frightening combination of the two challenges the senses—he is just a child and I still see a child and I do not want to take all this seriously. Yet his finger is firmly on the trigger and I know there is nothing to stop him from firing the gun. An expression, a noise, something within the boy himself could do it.
My guards in the car are no longer laughing. This armed gamin is more dangerous than any adult. He has no fear of death, doesn’t even know what fear or death are. Here in this forgotten land, torn by years of lawlessness and civil war, death is commonplace and of passing little consequence. Except for a tear or two from a loved one, memories of the dead are often discarded.
For a moment I see myself as a child standing tall on a mound of dirt with a make-believe gun, and I wonder if there is any difference between us playing cops and robbers as children and pretending we can kill and this kid with a real gun who knows he can. At his age, there can be little distinction between fantasy and real life, between pretending to die and dying. Because civil war, anarchy, and instant killing are all he has known since he was born, is he not doing something quite natural? For him, childhood is not something he will ever experience. I still feel the baby in my arms. This boy could have been him some years ago, and inside I weep for the futility; this boy should not have a gun in his hands but a future. My compassion for this tough little boy with the gun has no limits and I want to get out, offer my hand, play ball with him, do something normal.
An audience begins to gather under the tin roof of the guardhouse. Dressed in white robes, men and boys drift from out of the shadows, dusty apparitions who watch in silence. This is quite a performance, and the elders, some on canes, with faces toothless and puckered, impassively observe the youngster’s moves. The boy feels the audience, and the attention seems to strengthen his resolve.
The fear of my guards is palpable—there is a smell to it. Fingers on triggers, they have lowered their guns toward the mob of indifferent silent ghosts. I share that fear: There is going to be a shooting here. Someone shouts from the side—encouraging the boy to shoot, I presume.
I take my eyes off the boy, hoping that without my interest the situation will somehow defuse itself; this is, after all, between Harun and the boy—not my problem. I am with the United Nations. I have a good humanitarian reason to be here. The boy probably doesn’t even see me in the back, squeezed as I am between my two guards. I grind deeper into the seat, a little more behind the fuzzy head on my left. Bloody hell, the guard senses what I’ve just done and he shifts his position, exposing me even more.
The child straightens. Slowly he swings his gun toward me. I stop breathing. He looks me up and down with a sneer of inexplicable contempt. Small dark eyes blaze with anger, focus, and lock on mine. He ignores the others. Something is getting personal here. He raises his assault rifle to my face. Bile rises in my throat. I am fixed by his eyes, eyes I cannot contact. I sense that if I look away he will fire. My eyes tear; I can no longer see his face. It becomes a blur behind the hole of the barrel of his gun. It is just a small black circle, and it is the most frightening thing I have ever seen. I am transfixed by this cavernous dark hole. I can almost fall through it. Beyond, I am aware of the unfocused image of this boy’s hate-filled face. Where could a child learn such hatred? My heart sledges so hard I can’t get a breath. Time is frozen, dead, meaningless. The arrogance and the insanity in the child’s eyes tell me he is considering shooting. I wonder if it is as easy for him as it looks, just squeeze the trigger. I sense within myself a certain discarnate resignation taking over, controlling my panic, resignation to my death. I am shaking.
Someone bellows orders from the crowd. The child with the big gun frowns in response to the voice. An old man in a dirty white djellaba and a woven Muslim cap, his squinty sun-beaten face deeply creased, raises his cane and barks in Arabic at the boy.
The child momentarily wavers, then straightens. He is not going to back down. He stands firm in a man’s role. This is his roadblock.
The old man mutters, spits out a leafy slurry of qat, hobbles out to the proud little sentry, grabs him by the ear, and hauls him away. The child drags his big gun behind him.
* * *
It is this monstrous little creature, obedient, easily brainwashed, malleable, who kills most relief workers.
There are three hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen fighting in thirty armed conflicts around the world. In Afghanistan, as well as in Somalia, thirty to forty-five percent of the soldiers are children. In Ethiopia, Uganda, and El Salvador, almost a third of the child soldiers are reported to be girls. Considered a renewable resource, children have become classic cannon fodder.
Recruitment is simple. A warlord’s militia or a marauding rebel force elsewhere enters a village and slaughters wholesale those adults they suspect of sympathizing with the enemy. They are often careful to avoid killing boys and girls. The children, many of whom have seen their parents massacred, are abducted and moved to special training camps. Boys are turned into soldiers and girls frequently are used as sex slaves for the local military commanders.
Children from four to fourteen are the best soldiers. They are easily trained, they don’t ask a lot of questions, they are less demanding, their notions of right and wrong are easily manipulated, they obey their elders, who themselves may be veterans of only fourteen or fifteen years old, they don’t know the effect of killing, they are inexpensive to maintain because they eat less, and they can easily be turned into killing machines through drugs, alcohol, and sheer fear. In Burma they are told that if they cry during a battle, they will be shot. In Sierra Leone, child soldiers were made to believe in magic; just before an ambush they were assured by their commanders that juju would protect them and stop enemy bullets.
Arming them is no problem. The ubiquitous Kalashnikov is so light and simple that it is a perfect child’s toy.
At an age when children should be playing games and going to school, they are roaming deserts, city streets, and jungles as humanity’s most vicious soldiers. More often than not, they are placed closest to the front. In Guatemala, children have been sent into minefields ahead of advancing older troops. Some children, according to Human Rights Watch, have been used for suicide missions. During the civil war in the Congo, children not quite in their teens were forced into acts of cannibalism. In Sierra Leone, child soldiers of the Revolutionary United Front, under orders from adults, systematically cut off the limbs of villagers suspected of favoring the government. Ibrahim, a child fighting for the RUF rebels since he was eight, admitted during an interview that he drank human blood every morning for breakfast—like coffee:
“When I go to war front, you know, I join a group. Yes, because I was staying with the Zebra Battalion, so our battalion do a lot of things, drinking human blood before going to front. That is my coffee I take in the morning. In the first battle, they gave us blood to drink. . . . It gives us mind to fight more. It tempts us to kill people . . . sometimes for a day, I kill more than five.
“My boys, they are afraid of me because whenever I am with my pistol, sometimes I shoot anything. Like we are sitting down talking, you know, and they want to bring something up. I just shoot and you die. Yeah, maybe sometimes I just see something that is strangeful to me and I say this, I want to kill this person.” Proudly, he added he was called General Bloodshed.
There is no dealing with this sort of insanity. I saw in the boy’s eyes at the barricade that he could pull the trigger for reasons that I am too old to understand. Age gives us the ability to reason, to communicate, and these children behind the guns, who have no fear, prove to be well beyond our ability to do either.
There is not much the international community can do effectively to prevent use of these cruelest combatants. It did finally create the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 2000, which banned the use of soldiers under the age of eighteen in hostilities. It does allow countries to accept voluntary recruits as young as sixteen with certain safeguards, including parental permission. Britain ratified what is called the Optional Protocol to the Convention, but the Ministry of Defense said it would continue to recruit fifteen-year-olds despite the prohibition against recruiting anyone under the age of eighteen. At present more than a third of the recruits of the UK armed forces are below this age. The deployment of seventeen-year-old soldiers during the 1991 Gulf War and the Kosovo conflict led human-rights groups to compare MoD policy to that of Third World countries. According to one report, an unspecified number of Forty-Five Commando, which joined the U.S.-led attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001–2002, were withdrawn because they were under the age of eighteen.
The United States, which has about three thousand seventeen-year-olds serving in the armed forces with their parents’ permission, initially opposed the treaty (so did Somalia when it had a government). The U.S. sent seventeen-year-old troops into armed conflict in Somalia, Bosnia, and the first Gulf War. The Pentagon agreed finally to take “all feasible measures” to ensure that seventeen-year-olds do not directly participate in hostilities. It was the first time the United States has ever agreed to change its practices in support of a human-rights standard.
Nations also are required to cooperate in the demobilization, rehabilitation, and reintegration of child soldiers to their communities. Since many of these children were forced to commit atrocities against their own families or neighbors, this is no easy task. Indeed, the crimes of these children are often so heinous that their families and communities refuse to accept them back. Eric Beauchemin, an expert on child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Liberia, who has had his own confrontations with armed children, said many of those he spoke to were forced to watch or take part in the murder, amputation, or rape of their parents, family members, or neighbors.
Sixteen-year-old General Bloodshed wants to go home, go to school, find his lost innocence. He says he wants to repay his debt to his village, where, he admits, he burned all the houses. General Bloodshed says he wants to become a minister “because I want to do God’s work.” Probably the best the world can hope for is that General Bloodshed and others like him simply discover an unknown childhood.
As for the tough little boy at the barricade, I can only hope he has put down the gun. But nothing changes in Somalia, and I suspect he may well be dead.