Saturday, June 30, 2007
The New Face of Warfare - book review from The Nation
In his book Innocents Lost, Jimmie Briggs recounts picking up the New York Times one morning. Opening the newspaper, he was confronted by a disturbing image--a large photograph of a young Liberian kneeling and howling on a city street, his face contorted with rage as he pointed a gun at the photographer who had captured his image. This was no child's play: The gun was real--an automatic rifle almost as big as the boy himself. As Briggs remembers, however, "More chilling than the weapon he held was what he wore on his back: a pink teddy-bear backpack, a telling symbol of his lost youth." [see the photo at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4791597]
...
In Colombia, Briggs speaks to Gueso, a 16-year-old fighting with one of the government's paramilitary militias in Medellín, northwest of the country. By the age of 8, Gueso had already learned how to use his first weapon, a .38 pistol. Within hardly a year, he had killed his first victim: "I stabbed a guy in the neck," he boasts cheerfully to Briggs. Wired on cocaine and alcohol during the interview, he keeps saying to Briggs, "Sometimes I feel like killing." Like most of the children who join rebel or paramilitary forces in Colombia, Gueso became involved with the paramilitaries largely as a result of poverty, lack of education and unemployment. "I'm not afraid to die, but I'm afraid to die so young," he tells Briggs. "You can't think about the future here, because the future is a coffin." The tragedy is that for children like Gueso, the future is a coffin whether or not they become child soldiers.
...
In Sri Lanka, Briggs meets Sebastiana Figerardo, a widow and the mother of seven children, the youngest of whom was Ida, a girl who joined the Tamil Tigers at the age of 17 after two of her brothers were murdered by government-aligned militias. While the Tamil Tigers are one of the few armed groups that prohibit sexual relations among their members, Ida was fated for an end of devastating sexual violence. After serving four years as a Tiger guerrilla, she decided to surrender to the government and go home. Assured by government security officers that no harm would come to her from the police or state-aligned forces, she returned. Within months, however, five masked men arrived early one morning at the family house. A neighbor who saw the men before putting on their masks identified them as government soldiers from a local army camp. The soldiers beat, gagged and tied Sebastiana, her other children and grandchildren, and dragged them to the courtyard in front of the house. They then turned to Ida. As the vicious assault on her daughter commenced only a few feet away, Sebastiana managed to free her hands and feet, and ran screaming to the local police station, begging the police to come and help. "We cannot come now," they replied calmly. "You need to go home." By the time Sebastiana returned home, her daughter was dead. An autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped, shot in the genitals and mutilated. Faced with the horrific murder of her third child, Sebastiana tells Briggs simply, "I have lost all faith in human beings." The five soldiers who carried out the assault have still not been brought to justice. ...
In his book Innocents Lost, Jimmie Briggs recounts picking up the New York Times one morning. Opening the newspaper, he was confronted by a disturbing image--a large photograph of a young Liberian kneeling and howling on a city street, his face contorted with rage as he pointed a gun at the photographer who had captured his image. This was no child's play: The gun was real--an automatic rifle almost as big as the boy himself. As Briggs remembers, however, "More chilling than the weapon he held was what he wore on his back: a pink teddy-bear backpack, a telling symbol of his lost youth." [see the photo at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4791597]
...
In Colombia, Briggs speaks to Gueso, a 16-year-old fighting with one of the government's paramilitary militias in Medellín, northwest of the country. By the age of 8, Gueso had already learned how to use his first weapon, a .38 pistol. Within hardly a year, he had killed his first victim: "I stabbed a guy in the neck," he boasts cheerfully to Briggs. Wired on cocaine and alcohol during the interview, he keeps saying to Briggs, "Sometimes I feel like killing." Like most of the children who join rebel or paramilitary forces in Colombia, Gueso became involved with the paramilitaries largely as a result of poverty, lack of education and unemployment. "I'm not afraid to die, but I'm afraid to die so young," he tells Briggs. "You can't think about the future here, because the future is a coffin." The tragedy is that for children like Gueso, the future is a coffin whether or not they become child soldiers.
...
In Sri Lanka, Briggs meets Sebastiana Figerardo, a widow and the mother of seven children, the youngest of whom was Ida, a girl who joined the Tamil Tigers at the age of 17 after two of her brothers were murdered by government-aligned militias. While the Tamil Tigers are one of the few armed groups that prohibit sexual relations among their members, Ida was fated for an end of devastating sexual violence. After serving four years as a Tiger guerrilla, she decided to surrender to the government and go home. Assured by government security officers that no harm would come to her from the police or state-aligned forces, she returned. Within months, however, five masked men arrived early one morning at the family house. A neighbor who saw the men before putting on their masks identified them as government soldiers from a local army camp. The soldiers beat, gagged and tied Sebastiana, her other children and grandchildren, and dragged them to the courtyard in front of the house. They then turned to Ida. As the vicious assault on her daughter commenced only a few feet away, Sebastiana managed to free her hands and feet, and ran screaming to the local police station, begging the police to come and help. "We cannot come now," they replied calmly. "You need to go home." By the time Sebastiana returned home, her daughter was dead. An autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped, shot in the genitals and mutilated. Faced with the horrific murder of her third child, Sebastiana tells Briggs simply, "I have lost all faith in human beings." The five soldiers who carried out the assault have still not been brought to justice. ...
Labels: war
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