LONDON – Whatever happens in Liberia, whether President Charles Taylor really goes or stages a come back, whether American marines land or stand off shore, the damage has already been done. It has been done to the weakest and most vulnerable of its people, its children. The country, amongst all its many woes, has become a major recruitment centre for the small child soldiers who like to be photographed with the big man size guns. It is the same, indeed much worse, in the Congo to the south, where there are 40,000 abandoned children and adolescents running amok, ready to attach themselves to any gunslinger who gives them a meal.
We have no choice if we want a Saddam-free, bin Laden-free world tomorrow but go into overdrive to do something very serious about this terrible legacy of Africa’s post colonial civil wars. They may not become the leaders, but they are grist for the shock troops of such villains.
Africa with its wars may be the worse case, but the problem of abandoned or near-abandoned children is growing at an alarming rate in countries as varied as Cambodia, Thailand, India and Brazil. Twenty some years ago I recall being taken by a nun down to a plaza somewhere near the centre of San Paulo. She wanted to show me the 30 or so children sleeping rough. I was aghast. It was the first time in my then well established journalistic life I had seen this phenomenon outside a war zone. But it was nothing besides what was to come. Within ten years, in Rio de Janeiro alone 3,000 children slept on the streets and in San Paulo the number was even higher. The crime rate in Brazil has shot up the last twenty years faster than that of any other single country, with perhaps the exception of South Africa. On a number of occasions policemen have been accused of massacring these street children. Brazil is not by nature a violent country – it hasn’t been to war since 1870 and was one of the first to abandon capital punishment in 1855 – but its intrinsic laid back culture has been totally transformed by the feudal inequalities of the seventeenth century, unchanged for 400 years, meeting headlong the consumer pressures and over rapid urban growth of the last fifty years.
In Cambodia, a small country, almost destroyed by war, there are 20,000 child sex slaves working in brothels. In India, a country that has largely escaped internal damage from its three wars with Pakistan and its single border war with China, the U.S. State Department reported last year that there are 2.3 million women and girls working against their will as prostitutes and the United Nations estimates that two-fifths of them are under 18. In Thailand and the Philippines the child sex business has become an industry,
The blame falls almost randomly, but invariably the conditions are ripe when there is either war or too much poverty combined with too much inequality – although in Thailand it is not the poorest regions that have supplied the majority of child prostitutes, it is the villages which have tasted the consumer society and wish for a short cut to more of its fruits. Observers have tried to make a case for the disturbing impact of big American military bases in Thailand and the Philippines. But how would this explain the rapid growth of child prostitution in India or Brazil that have never had foreign bases?
Blame is also difficult to accurately impart in Africa. Some of it is certainly down to European colonialism. While it is true that warfare was a common occurrence before colonialism and it didn’t leave a legacy of abandoned children – orphans were incorporated into the family units of both neighbours and conquerors – the Europeans disturbed traditional African ways profoundly, and then probably didn’t stay long enough to build a sustainable, alternative system of governance. (Likewise, the U.S. in Liberia, with its long time, half in, half out policy.) They developed cities and plantations and imposed a tax system that drove people out of their villages and into the cultural anonymity of mines, agribusiness and cities, but they educated only a handful (half a dozen graduates in the Congo and seventeen in Zambia), insufficient for the needs of running a socially uprooted and a fast-changing nation state.
Fastening exact blame is an exercise for historians, whilst those who look to the future can only fear the legacy of the present. Won’t too many of these children mature into adults who will want to smash the world that has given them only pain and misery? What will be their nihilistic cause, criminal or political? Or a sadistic mixture of both? What can we realistically do about these “lords of the flies”? How can we avert more of them coming into being? We appear to be merely wringing our hands as we watch these children descend into a maelstrom of evil-doing, even though both common sense and experience suggest we will suffer the consequences of our inaction, and maybe in quite terrifying ways.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By JONATHAN POWERFollow this link to read about – and order – Jonathan Power’s book written for the
40th Anniversary of Amnesty International
“Like Water on Stone – The Story of Amnesty International”
