Facing
the chicken that might come
home to roost
By
Jonathan
Power
August 20, 2003
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 POWER
Follow 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"
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