One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  I sat down on a bench in the shade when I got too tired to keep playing. One of the social workers grabbed Sakundi from the game and told him to go over and talk to me. He obeyed without objection and came trotting over from the dirt field. He never complained that his game had been interrupted, though I felt guilty that my presence had disrupted his play. He assured me that he didn’t mind as long as I promised to play more when we were done. He smirked a bit. He was a smartass, but a charming one. I accepted his offer, my cheeks stinging in anticipation.

  Sakundi had been in the army for two years, and he looked it. His features were hard and his arms were muscular, though thin. He answered my questions as if they were orders being given. He talked without emotion about his time in the army and his life afterwards.

  When he was twelve, his family sent him to the market. He saw a truck with soldiers around it talking to a group of young people.

  “Anyone who wants to join the army can, because we want soldiers. Come join us,” they said. So at twelve years old, Sakundi joined them. He got in their truck and left for the military base.

  “I didn’t tell my family because I never said good-bye.”

  My pen hesitated on my pad, and I looked at him for a moment.

  “Nobody forced me,” he said, anticipating my question.

  At the military base they woke early in the morning to march and to learn how to fight. He saw older women that the soldiers used for prostitution, he said, but he had no interest in them. He was more interested in the fighting and the adventure. He wasn’t interested in girls yet. Despite the adult statements he made, he was still a little boy in the army. He didn’t have any friends, he said. “Only soldiers.” He was learning to use a gun and to follow orders, which he liked.

  “Did you fight?” I asked.

  “When we heard the Mayi Mayi, our enemy, in the bush, we’d shoot at them, they would shoot at us. We would try to kill them.” He acknowledged his experiences, made no effort to deny them, yet he did not want to dwell on them either. “I hated the Mayi Mayi because they lived in the forest,” he said.

  “One day, I was just sitting at our camp, and the commander came and took my gun and said I was too young. They sent me here to be demobilized, but I don’t like it here. I want to leave.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Right now, I want to find my family or study. I would like to join the army again, but because I’m too young now, I can’t. One day I will again.”

  Sakundi’s day may have come sooner than either of us thought. The day after we met, the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo ravaged the city. I had to evacuate and it was only from Kigali, Rwanda, that we could start making phone calls to see who was safe and who was not. Lava surrounded the center where Sakundi lived. We learned on the news that around half a million people had been displaced, most crossing the border into Rwanda just hours behind us.

  When we got the priest who ran the center on the phone, he was with a few of the boys who stayed behind, digging a trench to protect the center from the lava flow. The other children had been sent with the general refugee exodus across the border to Rwanda and shelter was arranged for them there. I never got to ask about specific children, but in all the shifts back and forth, it would have been easy for Sakundi to slip away. If he wanted to, he could find an army willing to take him in, willing to send him back to the forest to fight his enemy.

  I never found out what happened to the children I played soccer with at that center. I like to picture them digging trenches with the priest, protecting their home, and returning to school, but the jungles outside the city are still dangerous, militias still attack villages, and a Kalashnikov costs about as much as a goat. For youths who want to fight, there are plenty of opportunities. For youths who do not want to fight, opportunities are scarce.

  As long as war continues, armies will need young people as fodder for the cannons. Those who choose to exploit children in this way must be punished. The companies that trade with these armies must be punished. The cost in punishment for using child soldiers or supporting those who do must become so astronomical that it is no longer worth it. More important, children must be given other choices by the adult world. As they all said, they would like to go to school instead of fighting.

  School. Over and over again they said it. I want to go to school. I want to study. From orphans the world over one hears the phrase: education is my mother and father. School is the great creator of childhood, the defining space in which the pupil’s relationship to the world is clear: he is a student; he is a child. In choosing school, in longing to be part of that space, that world, these former soldiers were choosing to change their relationship to society. Regular schooling for adolescents is still elusive in the eastern Congo. Young people are needed to contribute to the family economy or must fend for themselves for survival. They are in competition with the adults for what little money there is. This is a region where one in four children die before the age of five. I am reminded of the medieval concept of childhood—don’t get too attached to the young, because they probably will not survive. If they do, then they work when they are able.

  School, however, provides another option. In the West, children stare past the windows of their schools, longing to get out. In much of the rest of the world, children stare into the windows of the schools, longing to get in. The alternative to schooling is the harsh world of adulthood, the fierce game of survival. School not only creates opportunity for these young people; it creates their childhoods.

  The former child soldiers I met had thought as adults and fought as adults, ruled over adults by force, and now they wanted to put away adult things and become children once more. Perhaps the new government in the Congo can foster peace and stability, can deliver on the promises of politicians for more schools, schools for everyone, can give these little grown-ups the chance to turn into children.

  Without the chance to go to school and become children again, without hope, without opportunities, Paul, Musa, Xavier, Sakundi, and myriad other child soldiers all over the globe, despite wanting very different things for their lives and coming from very different backgrounds, are all left with the same option: to pick up a gun and to fight.

  SIX

  “Surviving the Peace”

  Coming of Age in Post-War Kosovo and Bosnia

  How do you know a Serb from an Albanian?” I asked, kicking the ball gently to Katja, who sailed it back to me, right through my legs.

  We had finished our history lesson, our story of the Battle of Kosovo, and I wanted to learn more about how these kids, five years after the war in Kosovo, three months after the riots, thought about ethnicity. Slobodan Milošević was on trial in the Hague; a referendum would soon be considered on whether Kosovo would achieve independence from Serbia. These were Serb children with whom I played; children who were frightened of being cut off from Serbia, children who were penned in to ethnic enclaves for their own protection from the dominant ethnic group, the Albanians. I wanted to know what they thought of all this ethnicity. How do you know who’s who?

  “They have a different language,” Katja said when I returned with the ball, having chased it almost to the main road out of Lapjo Selo again.

  “And they hate us,” Marko added.

  “You hate them too, though, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” the children answered together. “But only because they hate us,” Stefan explained.

  “But if your only difference is language, how do you know who to hate if they don’t speak, if they stay quiet?”

  “They have a different religion,” Katja said without needing a moment to think about it. “They have mosques; we have churches.” She was growing weary both of my poor soccer playing and my infantile lack of comprehension on this issue that to them seemed so clear, so ingrained that it need not be explored. Hadn’t I heard of the Battle of Kosovo? They had just told me the story. Had I forgotten already? Did they need to tell it again?

&n
bsp; “You can know us,” little Miroslaw, the author of the drawing that started our conversation about history said, “by our damage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can know that we are Serbs by the damage we can do if any shiptar come here looking for trouble.” The word shiptar was the pejorative for Albanians. It carried the same weight as kike, or nigger, or spic would in America. No one was fazed by it.

  “If they come here looking for trouble…,” Marko said, smiling and acting out some kung fu moves on Miroslaw. The other boys quickly jumped in, laughing and mock karate chopping.

  I turned to Niko, my translator. He was a Serb who worked with the NATO forces, disarming the local population, manning checkpoints, going on patrols. He spoke Albanian and Serbian fluently, though Albanians didn’t trust him because he was a Serb and Serbs didn’t trust him because he worked with the Americans. The Americans bombed the Serbs in 1998, ending the campaign to cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian population and sending the Serbs scrambling for shelter, from the bombs and the Kosovo Liberation Army, the former guerilla force that seized the country thanks to the bombing. Politics limited his friendships rather dramatically. Niko wasn’t prejudiced, though. He didn’t care who was Serb, Albanian, or American. He just wanted to study computers and get on with his life. Watching the boys kick and chop at each other, he shrugged and shook his head a little.

  “They are very isolated here,” he told me. “They don’t know any better.”

  I watched them roughhouse, the soccer ball sitting idly in the field where my last kick had gone astray. They chased each other around, and I imagined them playing a game like Cowboys and Indians. In Israel it was Israeli and Palestinian. In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi, in Belfast Taig and Prod. Every society in the world has these games of otherness. As I watched the children playing, however, and thought how casually they wrote off the Albanians, how difficult coexistence was proving to be, I thought about another soccer club I had read of, Red Star Belgrade.

  Red Star Belgrade was a prominent soccer club in Serbia. When uprisings against Belgrade’s rule of all the provinces of Yugoslavia began in the early nineties, a nationalist thug and wanted gangster known as Arkan drew supporters for his paramilitary group, the Serb Volunteer Guard, from the fan base of Red Star Belgrade. He was a soccer fanatic; he knew the guys who hung out in the bars on game days, who gathered in crowds and went out looking for trouble with the opposing team’s fans. These were his people. They loved Red Star Belgrade as much as they loved their people, the proud and oft-maligned Serb people. Their violence was born of love, of a kind. Soccer and nationalism, as any World Cup observer notices, are never far apart. That kind of love, that kind of loyalty turns easily to violence. What started as a fan club for Red Star evolved into a gang of thugs and turned into much worse.

  Arkan’s Tigers, as they were called, ended up acting as a death squad throughout Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo during the nineties, playing a role in the Srebrenica Massacre, the siege of Sarajevo, and in the campaign of ethnic cleansing throughout Kosovo. During the latter conflict, Arkan also owned a soccer club, Obilic, which spent one season as a championship team, until the Union of European Football Associations banned them from European competitions because of the team’s connection to war criminals. Games and politics, politics and ethnic warfare, soccer and murder, they all merged in the Balkans.

  Young Marko’s popularity and charisma seemed suddenly ominous given this sordid history of play. In Kosovo, the mass graves from Serbian offensives in 1999 were still being unearthed. I had just come from the Albanian village of Lubeniq, where Serb paramilitary groups killed over eighty villagers in less than a month. The name Arkan still caused fear among the Muslim population and shame among many Serbs, though he had been assassinated in 2000. There are others, though, who see Arkan as a hero, a true patriot, and one in a long line of martyrs for Serb freedom.

  Marko doing his karate chops against imaginary enemies was fighting all the enemies of history, the enemies who took his home in Pristina in 1998, the enemies who burnt houses and monasteries three months earlier, in March, the enemies who took all the jobs, all the money, the enemies who took his parents’ pride, his nation’s pride, his people’s pride, the enemies who took Lazar’s kingdom. There was no shortage of supposed enemies.

  We played soccer, they roughhoused, they fought ghosts. I feared then, I fear now, that with the wrong leadership, a new Arkan in their midst, this same group of boys could be turned on real people, the other, the enemy, the Albanians and the whole bloody conflict would start again.

  I pressed them to consider their beliefs.

  “But why would they come here looking for trouble?” I asked when Miroslaw drew close.

  “Because,” he said, in perfect imitation of Marko, “it’s the history.”

  For the Albanian children in Kosovo, recent history had a firmer hold on their minds than the ancient battle of Kosovo. Yugoslavia had been a prosperous communist state until the early 1990s, when the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from the Yugoslav federation. Bosnia was the next to declare its independence, which led to the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Only a few years later, in 1999, the small province of Kosovo, located inside Serbia, became the site of increased violence. The province is the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox Church, though it is 90 percent ethnic Albanian today. An organization committed to the independence of Kosovo, the Kosovo Liberation Army, had begun using aggressive terrorist tactics to agitate for freedom. The crackdown from the government in Belgrade was brutal and swift, attempting to cleanse Kosovo of its entire Muslim population. The international community responded with bomb attacks on Serb military and government sites and Kosovo, though still technically part of Serbia, became a NATO occupied territory, administered by the United Nations. Ethnic tensions between the Albanian Muslims and the small Serb population left behind remain near the boiling point.

  Girls like Nora, from Zahaq, and Leo in Lubeniq, Albanian children whose parents were killed by Serb paramilitary units, or like Eric who lost his home and his neighbors, did not need to go back hundreds of years to find the wrongs done to them. They held onto the memories of the recent civil war to sustain their sense of self, their difference from the Serbs. The province was dotted with monuments to fallen KLA soldiers, carved in black stone, and to several children who were murdered by the paramilitary units. Their names were engraved in the sides of buildings, in ubiquitous political graffiti, on gravestones.

  “Serbs are different from us,” Eric said, “because they speak a different language and because they show no respect for Albanians.”

  It sounded familiar.

  Perhaps my mind played tricks on me. Did this Albanian boy look just like Marko? Probably not, but in my new turn as amateur ethnographer, trying to see the difference between Albanian and Serb, I could not. The boys were interchangeable. They were boys—snot-nosed, cocky, charming, stinky, mad as hell, mournful, stumbling graceful boys defining themselves against their enemies. Defining themselves against each other, because this is what teenage boys do.

  “They speak a different language,” Peter said. He was ten years old, originally from the city of Peja (called Peč by the Serbs, renamed when the Albanians took over), but he fled into the mountains during the war. Now he lives in Rugova, a stunning, but isolated region. The air is chilly and crisp. It was sweltering down in Peja, so I was glad to escape into the hills, where life is perhaps harder, but, as Eric observed, there were no Serbs around to bother them.

  Peter showed a remarkable awareness of the arbitrary nature of ethnicity in Kosovo. “If I spoke Serb instead of Albanian,” he said, “I’d be a Serb.” He thought a moment more, not content with his answer. It didn’t sound right. The look Eric gave him spoke volumes as well, perhaps pushed him to reconsider his position. “If you want to be an Albanian, you are an Albanian. It’s in you.”

  Malesora, a twelve-year-old girl w
ho joined us after school in one of the chilly classrooms, added her ideas. “It’s the education that makes an Albanian. If we go away and lose our language and our culture, then we are no longer Albanian.”

  The others nodded in agreement. Having all been denied access to school under the Serbs and then driven into exile, the children did not see these as purely academic questions. Their Albanian identities were nearly destroyed not long ago.

  “What makes a Serb a Serb?” I asked. Malesora repeated the question to herself, thinking hard.

  “A shkja,” she said, using the derogatory term for Serbs, “kills Albanians, that’s how you know.”

  “Even if a shkja learned Albanian,” Peter threw in, to make sure his point was clear, “he would still be a shkja at heart. He would still hate us.” They slipped quickly, thoughtlessly, effortlessly to using the term shkja the same way their Serb peers used shiptar when talking about them.

  The war had been over for five years. The children with whom I met on both sides were between eight and ten years old during the war itself. All of them wanted to be left alone, to live in peace. But few had found that peace that comes with forgiveness. The entire province still seemed to be in the mentality of war, hating the enemy, avoiding contact except to taunt or come to blows. The casual use of racist language was a symptom that reinforced the disease.

  I had expected to find a society healing from the wounds of war, but the children I met were picking at one scab continuously. While, for the most part, their drawings expressed concern with the everyday problems of life—no more anguished pictures of murder and destruction as I’d seen in the ongoing conflicts in Burma and throughout East Africa. They drew pictures concerned with family and landscape—as some of the children in East Africa and Asia had as well. Politics and nationalism also found expression in the children’s drawings in the Balkans. With the Albanians it was a longing for the future, as in one drawing that showed Kosovo as it was now—dirty, crime-ridden, crumbling—and Kosovo as it could be after independence—clean and prosperous with lovely homes and shining skyscrapers (Figure 21). Another drawing showed Kosovo at a crossroads, with war and drugs and collapse in all directions but one: the shining direction of independence (Figure 22). The Albanian children longed for an independent Kosovo the way the Serb children longed for Lazar to rise, messianic, and return them to glory. Their drawings held a nostalgic longing for the past they had only heard described, had only ever dreamed in stories.