One Day the Soldiers Came (4 page)

Neil Postman asserts in his book
The Disappearance of Childhood
that the modern world is “halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood,” by which he means that the modern world is forgetting that children need to be kept separate from the adult complexities of life in order to be healthy and happy. Though his was largely a critique of media culture, that same notion has been exported to humanitarian crises as well, taking the basic assumption that children occupy a privileged space in society as gospel truth. But this privileged space has never been a given in much of the world, and the notion of childhood has never been a fixed state.

The United Nations, in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, states, “a child means every human being below the age of eighteen.” As a legal instrument, this is sufficient, but it sheds no light on the various cultural contexts that define the relationships between the world of children and adults around the globe.

For the Gussi tribe of Kenya, the rite of passage into adulthood occurs at age eight, while the Jewish bar mitzvah occurs
at age thirteen. In some societies childhood ends for girls with puberty and marriage, or is defined by whether or not a boy is in school or working. In medieval Europe, childhood ended at age seven, when children could master spoken language. The Catholic Church still recognizes age seven as the age at which children can understand concepts of right and wrong, can begin to use reason. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “Age of body does not determine age of soul. Even in childhood man can attain spiritual maturity.”

Childhood is not a concept set in stone. The idea of childhood, as most of us understand it, has existed for less than two hundred years. In the Middle Ages in Europe, no distinction was made between children and adults. They wore the same sort of clothes and once they could care for themselves, as far as we know, they did. They worked and talked like adults. They did everything adults did. Childhood was given no special place in society, and children were not particularly valued. Their death rates were so high that few got very sentimental about childhood. In a seventeenth century French manuscript quoted by Philippe Ariès, in his
Centuries of Childhood
, a neighbor consoles a young woman who has just given birth to her fifth child by saying: “Before they are old enough to bother you, you will have lost half of them, perhaps all of them.”

In the Middle Ages, there was no great effort to protect children from the adult world, as there was no concept that they were not already part of that world. Childhood sexuality was not taboo. It was, in fact, a source of great amusement to all levels of society, as Ariès notes with a particularly graphic account from the life of young Louis XIII. Looking at paintings of peasant life in Holland by Pieter Brueghel, one can see children fully engaged with the adult world, in feasts and drinking and even in the march with Christ to Calvary.

The idea of children inhabiting a privileged sphere of society from adults only emerged in the seventeenth century, and even then it took root only in the middle and upper classes. As literacy attained value in Europe, children needed to acquire the necessary skills to become literate, which led to greater interest in schools than ever before. Educational standards became necessary and schools became the place to instill the standards. Schools were separate from the world of adults, and pupils were expected to study and learn, rather than to work. They were to learn to become adults, to gain access to knowledge that would make them able to participate and succeed in the adult world, which had become a world filled with information thanks to the printing press. School was a place for children, the world beyond a place for adults.

Of course, in order to send one’s children to school, before free public education was commonplace, one had to be able to afford it. One had to remove potential contributors to the household economy from the equation while taking on an extra expense. Among the lower classes in Europe, this did not happen. Childhood took much longer to trickle down to them, and the young remained fully immersed in the world of adults, with no distinction, as it had been for centuries. The idea of childhood was a luxury for the wealthy and the safe. During the industrial revolution it was the elites who protected the notion of childhood, even as the children of lower classes worked in deplorable conditions for obscene hours and low wages. The idea of childhood was nearly lost in Europe. The elites led the drive for policy changes that protected children, and the elites consumed the goods—clothing, books, games—created for children. It was a long struggle to create a culture in which the idea of childhood could be taken for granted by all levels of society.

Today, these conditions are not universal. Economic, cultural, and political factors clash with the imported idea of childhood on a regular basis. Economically, it is clear why, in very poor countries, children would be compelled to work—tending the flocks or farming or making carpets or begging to help support the family.

Even with access to schooling, in areas of extreme poverty, the Western ideal of childhood is not secure. In Senegal, it is a common practice for young boys to be sent away to religious schools, called
daara
, where they are sent out during the day to beg for their teacher. If they come back empty-handed, they are beaten. As one boy, Ibrahim Sow, a sixteen-year-old in Senegal, told the IRIN news service:

Cultural differences also clash with the Western idea of childhood, given the different ages and circumstances that define a child’s relationship to the adult world through coming of age rituals and so forth. But politics too can dash the fragile and hard-earned status of the young against the rocks.

Consider little Johnny and Luther Htoo:

In January of 2000, a group of Burmese rebel fighters from the insurgency group God’s Army took over a hospital in downtown Ratchaburi, Thailand, holding hundreds of hostages, sending Burma’s civil war spilling over Thailand’s borders. The Karen are a minority ethnic group in Burma, primarily Christian. They have a large and sympathetic population along the Thai-Burma border.

“We want to tell the world how Karen and Burmese refugees live during the fighting. We will not hurt any of the hostages, we will take good care of them,” said one of the gunmen to Reuters Press Agency. The rebels were fighting as part of a long war against the military junta in Burma (Myanmar, as the ruling junta renamed it in 1989—the names matter, the names tell whose side you are on, where your loyalties lie). The junta has one of the worst human rights records in the world: they
routinely jail dissidents, censor the media, target and displace civilians in order to cut the rebels off from support, and, according to reports from several human rights groups, use rape as a tactic of war. They justify their actions by claiming the rebels want to break Burma apart along ethnic lines, though the various ethnic armies have long disavowed that goal.

Living in New York City, it is easy for me to condemn violence and espouse pacifism, to urge nonviolent resistance, but I can understand how, for someone living under the conditions created by this regime, fighting against it could be a valid choice. A reasonable person could rationally choose to fight this regime. The question comes down to how much credit we give young people for rationality.

God’s Army, which was based in the jungles near the Burmese border with Thailand, was led by two twelve-year-old brothers from the Karen ethnic group, Johnny and Luther Htoo: black-tongued, cigar-smoking soldiers whose followers claimed they possessed magical powers to dodge bullets and step on land mines without setting them off. Their legend began when their village was attacked. By some accounts, they rallied the villagers around them and fought back, killing many soldiers in the process and escaping unharmed through a heavily mined area. They were nine years old at the time.

The God’s Army group that took hostages in Thailand three years later said they wanted attention rather than power. They wanted doctors and nurses to fly to the border regions and aid their injured fighters. They demanded that Thailand stop aiding the Burmese government’s attacks on rebel bases. The hostage-takers freed fifty of their prisoners after the Thai army chief ordered his troops to end the shelling of the guerillas’ base on the Burma border. The only casualty occurred when a stray bullet injured a teacher at a nearby school, according to a local radio station. The next day, the Thai army raided the hospital,
killing ten of the gunmen. The
Sydney Morning Herald
reported, “Some of the bodies [of the gunmen] were reported to be small and childlike.”

I think Johnny and Luther would have identified with the rest of the quotation attributed to St. Thomas’: “Age of body does not determine age of soul…many children, through the strength of the Holy Spirit they have received, have bravely fought for Christ even to the shedding of their blood.”

In 2001 Johnny and Luther turned themselves in along with seventeen of their fighters. Among them was a bodyguard named Rambo, who many believe was one of the real commanders of the militia, using the boys as cover, training and guiding them while cultivating their public image. Many on both sides of the border, however, still maintained their faith in the two boys as commanders and saviors.

“I want to live as a family with my parents. I want to study,” Luther told the gathered press when he and his brother emerged from the jungles to end their days as soldiers. Their militia was in shambles, starving and under constant attack by the army.

Entering Thailand carrying small backpacks, looking frail and tired, they were received by the Thai prime minister, who promptly patted them on the head, a social symbol in Thailand that immediately reduced their status to that of schoolchildren. One would not pat a god on the head.

The boys explained that they had no magical powers. They found their mother in a refugee camp in Thailand. In 2004 sixteen-year-old Luther Htoo married a nineteen-year-old woman and they had a child together in the camp. Luther says he wants a job so he can support his young family.

Johnny says he still thinks about the oppression of his people. In 2004 he told a reporter for the Bangkok-based
Nation
newspaper, “If I could, I would exchange a comfortable life [in the camp] and die for the peace of the Karen nation.”

He may have gotten in his chance. It is possible that, at eighteen years old, he left the safety of the refugee camp to return to fighting. A junta-backed news service in Burma reported on July 26, 2006, that Johnny Htoo and several other followers of God’s Army “turned themselves in” to the military junta. The truth of this claim is a mystery, as the media is tightly controlled, but indications suggest that Johnny was no longer in the refugee camp where he had been living. Whether he turned himself in (which is doubtful given the junta’s reputation for torturing prisoners), or was captured is unknown, but as a young adult he had made the choice to return to the war he had left as a child while his brother stayed behind.

Johnny and Luther Htoo stir up questions for me. What makes them so different from the kids I’ve seen in pictures on the news from refugee camps, the victims of war? What makes them so different from American children? What makes them so different from adults? They were physically capable of anything the grown-up soldiers could do. Johnny and Luther clearly had political views, or at least political impulses; they made moral choices, perhaps not always good ones, but regardless, they made commitments to their people and their cause, and they are growing up making choices based on value systems formed when they were younger. If children can make such commitments, what does that say about their childhoods? Were Johnny and Luther robbed of their childhood by the adults who drafted them into the fighting or turned them into messianic symbols? Would it have been better for them to grow up complacent, live under the regime that oppressed them, and remain ignorant of their people’s struggle until they turned eighteen?

One could say their less than ideal conditions forced Johnny and Luther to become soldiers and killers, and this brings up an essential question for me:

When were safety and stability the norm for young people?

Why is it essential to childhood development that safety and stability reign? Doesn’t human history show us that war, violence, loss, and upheaval are far more common than peace and prosperity? It is estimated that since 3600
B.C.
there have been 14,000 wars, and at least 160 since the end of World War II. Looked at in this light, children who grow up without knowing war would seem to be the exception in history.