Postponed childhood

(ES)

Drawings by children recruited in Sierra Leone

They can not erase the past, and its memory haunts them day and night, endless nightmare that it is impossible to wake up.
They are locked in a present without the possibility of looking to the future, because their memories of the past are the ballast that keeps them from moving forward.
Terrible memories of killings, rapes and mutilations. Of dehumanized life, full of hate and fear.
The vague memory of a happier time yet cause even more damage, because it was violently taken away.

A childhood of games, friends, family and neighborhood that was broken the day when the military arrived. They killed men and women, also the babies. Suddenly, the flames only. The younger boys and girls were taken with them, either fled and joined an armed group seeking safety and shelter. Children who have seen how their parents and siblings were murdered and their homes burned down.

Boys forced to kill a friend in exchange for their own lifes to show loyalty and courage. Girls used as sex slaves, raped over and over, pregnant and forced to abort. Minors beaten, tortured, raped, brutalized, scared ... and so a long list of abuses.

Fear, hatred and uprooting are the keys to turn a minor into a soldier. It is estimated that there are more than 300,000 worldwide.

The disarmament, demobilization and reintegration programs turn them again into civilians when they achieve to leave the army, whether regular or irregular. But it is not easy to return to civilian life when they have spent so much time as soldiers in armed conflicts. Orphans, homeless, rootless, with shame for the atrocities committed and the fear of not being accepted back by their communities. This, together with the strong links forged with military life, makes reintegration very difficult but not impossible. Many of these children return to study and learn a trade. Hopefully, they will be forgiven and accepted by their communities. Other re-enlist, unable to forget their past and find their future.

Any peace process requires to look forward, remember the innocent victims, to forgive and regret.

As we age we only left our memories. If stealing a life is death, stealing the memories is like dying in life. It is disheartening to think that child soldiers have died in life twice. The first when their families were snatched from them, the second when they were forced to kill or die in a forgotten war. Both memories are so heartbreaking that they prefer not to dwell on them. Memories stolen, postponed childhood.

©UNICEF/Olivier Asselin

"I remember the day I decided to join the mayi-mayi. It was after an attack on my village. My parents, and also my grand-father were killed and I was running. I was so scared. I lost everyone; I had nowhere to go and no food to eat. In the mayi-mayi I thought I would be protected, but it was hard. I would see others die in front of me. I was hungry very often, and I was scared. Sometimes they would whip me, sometimes very hard. They used to say that it would make me a better fighter. One day, they whipped my [11-year-old] friend to death because he had not killed the enemy. Also, what I did not like is to hear the girls, our friends, crying because the soldiers would rape them."

Jacques, from DRC, was recruited into an insurgent group (mayi-mayi) when he was 10 years old

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Helpless heroes

(ES)

Sometimes the answers to simple questions are harder to find. And the context of the question is as important as the answer itself.

I wonder why the heroes are those who decide to help the weakest. In our society most of us have sufficient ability and resources to do so.
I wonder why the courageous are those who defend their ideas. In our society the rights and freedoms are guaranteed constitutionally.
I wonder why the commitment and critical thinking are misfits attitude. In our information society, injustice, Human Rights violations, corruption and abuse of power are exposed to the public and are the source of the indignation from which commitment is born.

Is not this a distorted view of reality to keep alive a socially unfair and unsupportive system?
I wonder why social success is so away from commitment, activism and solidarity.

And ultimately, why we are not more supportive? Why commitment is the exception not the rule?

People of the global world we inhabit are also searching for answers. But only find silence, and silence is helplessness.
People who want democracy and whose governments use security forces that should protect them to suppress any peaceful demonstration, killing their sons and daughters.
People dispossessed of their lands, forced to become refugees in their own country.
People starving because their means of production have been stolen.
People whose natural resources are plundered and raped their sons and daughters.
Peoples enslaved and brutalized.
People looking for their dignity and freedom.
People who want peace and justice.
Braves to their chagrin. Heroes out of obligation.

Only those who are facing with the silence, oblivion and death, are chosen by fate to become real helpless heroes.

That their heroic gestures of every day for their survival, for their dignity, for defending their rights, for justice and for freedom that have at least a courageous response by those with the ability to choose.

Maybe I may never find answers to my questions, only silence, but while there are oppressed people is our duty to give them voice and not give up the fight to prevent the shadow of helplessness to be spread as a lethal blanket across our planet.

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Doubts allowed

(ES)

"Humanity follows two world-wide sects:
One, man intelligent without religion,
The second, religious without intellect."

"But some hope a divine leader with prophetic voice
Will rise amid the gazing silent ranks.
An idle thought! There's none to lead but reason,
To point the morning and the evening ways."

"A little doubt is better than total credulity"

The world was seen that way 1.000 years ago by Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri a blind philosopher and poet born in Syria.

The world remains intolerant, based on power relationships, governed by leaders who think they possess the truth and inhabited by subjugated peoples.

Subdued by the power of arms.

Subdued by the power of ignorance.

Subdued by the power of capitalism and consumerism.

And subdued by a system designed to the measure of the powerful, in any form of social organization and government. A system that does not support the doubt, because doubt is born of reason and the reason is the source of dissidence.

The change starts in each one of us; no one will lead us but the reason and the power of love.

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A stony humanity

(ES)

There is a common place inhabited by the worst feelings, far from ethical and moral principles, the native land of conscienceless careerists. Housed in its misery, coexist the wealth and poverty, some in its meanness and others in its misfortune. Inert and soulless place where the human intelligence, free from conscience, predator becomes the dignity, opportunities and hopes of the oppressed.

© Siegfried Modola/IRIN

Gaunt and soulless human beings inhabit there, their crimes go unpunished, its heart frozen.

Millions stare, silent witnesses to their barbarism, without realizing that their complicit silence, their busy life with passion for banal occupations, are nothing more than an unequivocal sign of their progressive dehumanization.

© Manoocher Deghati/IRIN

This common place of wealth and poverty is greed. A stony humanity goes into it, making the world a rocky wasteland. Only culture and education as a source of a true social progress will achieve to avoid the gradually desertification of humans.

"The Geology had lost a stone, and the society had won a man."
Marianela
Benito Pérez Galdós (1843 -1920)