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“War violates every right of a child – the right to life, the right to be with family and community, the right to health, the right to development of personality and the right to be nurtured and protected.”
Graca Machel (Expert to the Secretary General of the United Nations) The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, UNICEF, 1996.
The car stopped at the makeshift checkpoint that cut across the muddy backstreet in Musa Qala. A sentry appeared. "Are you Sunni or Shia?" he barked, waving his Kalashnikov at the driver. "Are you Pashtun or Hazara?"
"Hazara," the driver said. "Wrong answer," shouted the sentry, almost gleefully. "Get him!"
The high metal gate of a nearby house was flung open and four gun-toting males rushed out. They dragged the driver from his vehicle and held a knife to his neck. Quickly and efficiently, the blade was run from ear to ear. "Now you're dead," said a triumphant voice, and their captive crumpled to the ground.
Then a moment of stillness before the sound of a woman's voice. "Come inside boys! Your dinner is ready!" The gunmen groaned; the hapless driver picked himself up and trundled his yellow plastic car into the front yard; the toy guns and knives were tossed by the back door. Their murderous game of make-believe would have to resume in the morning.
Ali Reza and his five younger brothers, aged between six and 12, should have been at school. But their mother, Sayeeda, like thousands of parents in Musa Qala, now keeps her boys at home. Three weeks ago, armed men had intercepted their teacher's car at the school gates, then hauled him out and slit his throat. Just like in their game.
An entire generation of Afghans has grown up knowing nothing but invasion, war, bombing, repression and insurgency. Those years of war have left a terrible legacy in Afghanistan. It has always been a poor country; today it faces huge challenges. According to UNICEF: Afghanistan has the second highest infant mortality rate in the world; one in seven children is an orphan; only 28% of adults are literate; average annual income is $US250; and 30% of children aged 5 to 14 years are forced to work.
The future for Afghanistan’s children then, looks anything but bright. The legacy of decades of war is having an untold effect on their psychological, as well as their physical, health. Most who have been affected by violence this year say the violence was not related to the insurgency.
According to the Asia Foundation survey, only eight per cent of those who had suffered violence attributed it to the Taliban. However, civilian casualties as a result of military operations by international forces have been a lightening rod for public anger, and Mohammed, a resident of Kabul, explains the roots of this anger and why deaths caused by the international forces stir more anger than those by the Taleban: “ We know what to expect from the Taleban, but we don’t expect the same from the international forces. They are the ones upholding the rule of law and establishing democracy. They can’t be the ones killing innocents,” he said.
This willingness to hold the international community to higher standards of accountability is seen as a positive sign and evidence that Afghans still have great hope for change.
Right to life is a phrase that describes the belief that a human being has an essential right to live, particularly that a human being has the right not to be killed by another human being. Under the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, “Everyone's right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.”
But war has been the background and context for widespread and serious human rights abuses in Afghanistan. The conflict has been fuelled by outside powers who have provided political and military support to their favoured Afghan armed groups, advancing their own geo-political and economic goals at the expense of the suffering of millions of Afghan civilians. Children will be bearing the brunt of such intervention for their entire lives, and even though development and reconstruction programmes aim to provide the infrastructure for medical, educational and engineering facilities, it is an inside out approach that is necessary to rebuild the minds of a shattered generation.
Parents, teachers and doctors contacted by the International News Sentinel over the past three months cite a litany of distress signals sent out by young people in their care - from nightmares and bedwetting to withdrawal, muteness, panic attacks and violence towards other children, sometimes even to their own parents.
There are lessons to be drawn from the experiences of children and the child psychologists working with them in Iraq. During the height of the conflict there, Sherif Karachatani, a psychology professor at the University of Sulaymaniya, said:” Every day another innocent child is orphaned or sees terrible things children should never see. Who is taking care of the potentially enormous damage being done to a generation of children?” There are well-founded fears, he said, that the “relentless bloodshed and the lack of professional help will see Iraq’s children growing up either deeply scarred or so habituated to violence that they keep the pattern going as the enter adulthood.”
During the conflict in Iraq, organisations like UNICEF had only a skeleton presence in the country. Save the Children closed its operations after 15 years in Iraq, and the Iraqi Red Crescent Society was forced to suspend a programme for children suffering from war trauma owing to a lack of funding. The picture is looking similarly bleak in Afghanistan, where the overstretched hospitals cannot cope with psychological trauma and many of the best doctors have either fled the country or been killed. The problems are compounded by the stigma that psychological and psychiatric care carries. Parents do not take their children in for treatment, fearing they will be labelled as mad. The danger is that they internalise the violence they have witnessed and then reproduce it later.
In 1997, UNICEF revealed the findings of a first study of its kind in Afghanistan. It showed that the majority of children in Kabul were suffering serious traumatic stress. Some 72 per cent of children interviewed had experienced the death of a relative between 1992 and 1996. Almost all of the children interviewed had witnessed acts of violence. Two thirds of them had seen dead bodies or body parts and nearly half had seen people killed during rocket and artillery attacks. A disturbing 90 per cent believed they would die during the conflict.
Amidst the devastation of conflict, children’s educational and developmental needs have been forgotten. Children have had to find their own means of coping with the horrors of war. Young boys have taken on the responsibility of adults as the breadwinner of the family after their fathers have been killed. Criminal gangs engaged in drug trafficking and smuggling have preyed on their vulnerability. Armed groups have recruited children to fight in battles, turning them into perpetrators of violence themselves.
The games played by Ali Reza and his brothers, and other children like them will provide some indication of the mental state of a nation in the years ahead.
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