AK kids caught in adult’s war
’Children of War: Broken Childhood’, details the horrors millions of kids have to endure, writes
TWO boys sit in a classroom but they’re not looking at the lesson scribbled on the blackboard behind them. They are facing the camera, automatic weapons on their laps; their childhoods not circumscribed by lessons and homework but by war and the thousand-yard stares that speak of having seen things people should never have to.
The photo is one of several in an exhibition that opens tomorrow night at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and presents images captured by international conflict photographers.
Tali Nates, director of the centre and daughter of a Holocaust survivor, says the exhibition, “Children of War: Broken Childhood”, examines not just child soldiers but also children who are vulnerable, abused and trying to fend for themselves in the wake of displacement by conflicts across the world.
These photographs reflect the kind of experience that thousands of children endure daily from Southeast Asia to Syria and Africa. They are the real lives recently dramatised in the film Beasts of No Nation. Although efforts are ongoing to rehabilitate child soldiers and intervene to protect their rights, it’s an often impossible struggle.
For the UN to draw up a charter of children’s rights is one thing, but to enforce adherence is entirely another.
Unicef estimates there are roughly 300 000 child soldiers fighting in 30 conflict zones around the world, that more than two million children have been killed in conflicts over the past decade, that six million have been made homeless and that 12 million have been wounded or disabled.
The exhibition, curated by Leora Kahn of the NGO Proof: Media For Social Justice, is supported by the UN office of the special representative of the secretary general for children and armed conflict.
For Nates a child soldier is “not only a child with a gun. It can be a child making food and beds for soldiers or those who are used for sex as well.”
The effect on the psychology and development of these children is transgenerational. Nates uses the example of her own father to illustrate this point, recalling that he “was 14 when the Nazis invaded his town, he was in four concentration camps, a slave labourer who lost most of his family and was liberated by the Russians when he was 19 . So at 14 he doesn’t have any high school education and at 17 he’s digging mass graves in a concentration camp.”
She remembers her father “had nightmares all his life about these experiences”.
“He studied, became a mechanic, IN HIS EYES: A child soldier of the Sudanese Liberation Army, a rebel group fighting against the Sudanese government in Khartoum got married, had two kids, but he had nightmares and he was afraid of dogs and terrified of enclosed spaces for the rest of his life.”
The exhibition’s title reflects the terrible effects of the loss of childhood and Nates hopes that people will reflect on “what happens to a child who goes through hell, has no education and then by a wave of a magic wand is now supposed to live their life, get married, have children, educate your own children.”
The speakers at the opening will include a former child soldier who now lives in South Africa but whose identity is being kept secret to protect him.
There may not be a war in South Africa any more but Nates points out that “we have a lot of refugees and migrants and stateless children and so we work with the UN and different bodies to raise awareness about these issues”.
The centre is dedicated to educational programmes that make links between the Holocaust and other post-World War 2 genocides in places like Rwanda and Bosnia. Nates hopes that schoolchildren and refugees living in South Africa who come to the exhibition will “talk about issues and see the other as a human being and not as the other”.
“It’s not easy but it’s something that we strive to do.”
We must talk about issues and see the other as a human being . . . It’s not easy but it’s something that we strive to do
“Children of War: Broken Childhood” opens tomorrow at 7pm at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, Forest Town