One Day the Soldiers Came Page 2

  I play soccer in a grubby courtyard belonging to a local charity. It’s not much of a playground, filled as it is with giant puddles, pits, and loose shrubs, fenced in on all sides from the street, but the children have each other and an ingenious ball made of bundled plastic bags and string. That’s enough for them. The game is informal. To an outsider, it looks like a skirmish, all shuffling feet and half-playful shoulder shoves. There are rules, rituals, a code of behavior, but none I’ll be privy to. You could watch these children play for years and never see the current underneath, the history that creates this game, that’s passed it on through generations of kids just like these. They don’t need to learn the rules, they don’t exist in words. They’re in the blood. In the birth. There are no goal posts because there are no goals. Scoring is not the objective here, nor winning. The play is for the sake of play. Goals and points are finite, they imply a beginning and ending. This game has no beginning. It started long ago with other children and goes on in barrios and slums and ghettos and camps and shantytowns the world over. It will never end.

  I’m no good at soccer, and the ball passes through my legs. I twist to stop it, putting my left foot behind my right as I step backwards, tripping myself into the mud. Pratfall. The children with whom I’m playing burst into laughter. The oldest among them is sixteen; the youngest is ten. All of them are trained killers.

  The rebel group Rasemblement Congolaise pour la Democratie (RCD-Goma) controls this area, though it is often seized by paroxysms of violence from other factions or ethnic militias. The children have seen combat in a war widely known to be fought against civilians. I’m here to learn from them, to hear their stories, but we haven’t gotten that far. Now it’s time to play. Later, they’ll tell me about their killings, their wars gone by, their nightmares, and their hopes. But not yet.

  They’ve fought in different armies and come from different parts of the country. Fate has thrown them into this center together, turned them into a group, labeled child soldiers or ex-combatants or in some documents “youth who participate in armed conflict.” The labels tell you little. In the language of humanitarian aid, there are many categories for children: Street Children, Internally Displaced Children, Child Soldiers, Child Heads of Household, Unaccompanied Minors, Children in Conflict with the Law, Children Affected by HIV, Children Accused of Sorcery. Categorization is a way of processing children for targeted assistance in crisis situations. Most children will fit into more than one category; few children in a war zone will fit into none.

  No help there. Want to know them? Play soccer.

  Xavier plays delicately at first, kicking the ball as though it were made of glass. He lets the others charge in, lets them do the slide tackles. When the ball goes wide, he’ll chase it and bring it back toward the group. They cluster in front of him as he approaches, all defenders, no allies in attack. He charges right in, daring the whole pack of them, trying to come through the other side in control of the ball. Now he throws elbows, now the grunts and shoulder-shoves. That’s the game. You get the ball and you try to keep it. Xavier gets the ball and goes into the pack, goes looking for trouble. One doesn’t avoid trouble in this game; safety is not the goal. Risk, that’s the game. Get the ball and hazard losing it the moment it’s yours. It’s a game of constant loss.

  I shudder with a thought about little Xavier, who must be about fourteen years old, who plays soccer in flip-flops, whose skinny legs poke out from his ragged shorts, whose Adidas T-shirt is torn and far too big for him. I wonder how many people he has killed.

  Paul is always in the fray. He’s about four feet tall with big brown eyes. He has the looks of a boy who could play the cute little brother with the snappy comebacks on any sitcom. He shoves like the rest of them, but he smiles widely, his teeth glowing white (these children have no access to dentists, but they have no access to candy either). When others fall, he helps them up. He makes sure everyone gets to play. He’s thoughtful of me, trying to make sure I get the ball from time to time, trying to make sure I obey the amorphous rules—sometimes touching the ball means the game stops and you surrender it, sometimes you touch the ball and whoever kicked it has to be the monkey in the middle, sometimes it means nothing and the game just goes on and on and on. Paul is an excellent guide, a first-class soccer mentor for me. How did he end up here and not in school or on the set of a sitcom practicing his smile for adoring fans? What does he see when he closes his eyes at night? What does he hear?

  Another soccer game, a continent away.

  I nearly kick a soccer ball into a passing NATO truck with a machine gun mount. The gunmetal shines in the sunlight. The flag on the side suggests it’s the Swedes. We hold our breath as the ball soars toward the armored vehicle. It arcs over the grass, bounces once and careens into the road. It misses the truck by a few feet and the soldiers keep driving. The truck leaves a trail of dust that takes half an hour to settle. The Serb elementary school students around me laugh and sigh with relief, and the oldest among them, Marko, twelve, runs off after the ball with a roll of his eyes. The kids had been chasing my missed kicks all afternoon. It’s a steaming July day. I don’t just sweat. I lose water in buckets. Kosovo, 2004. The children all ask me the same question.

  “Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?”

  Marko was the first of these children to ask it, perhaps because he was the biggest, the most handsome, the best soccer player (except perhaps for Katja, who is surgical with her kicks and dazzling with her footwork, but she’s a girl, so doesn’t count, as the boys explained to me privately).

  “I saw Kosovo Polje on my drive here,” I answered, citing the field where the battle took place. The field was speckled with daisies and buffeted with high voltage power lines. It did not strike me as a likely place for events of great magnitude. It could have been any number of fields dotting Kosovo. It looked, in fact, like any roadside field in middle America. Flat and slightly sun-scorched, stuck between two major routes, north to Mitrovica and west to Peja (Peč in Serbian—the names matter). The only remarkable thing about this field was that everyone with whom I spoke brought it up. When I asked about the conflict between Albanians and Serbs, they would say, like Marko, “It’s the history. Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?” Over and over again, this refrain, “Do you know the Battle of Kosovo?”

  The field saw a lot of bloodshed, terrible violence between Muslims and Christians, with casualties on both sides. The small province of Kosovo still reels from the battle. The leaders of both armies died in the conflict. The battle on Kosovo Polje secured Slobodan Milošević’s power over the crumbling Yugoslav state in the late eighties. Serb children still draw pictures of it, lamenting Serbia’s loss, the cause of all their present woes. The myth of the battle, the myriad interpretations of the story, of the massacres and war crimes, could easily hurtle the province of Kosovo back into civil war. This is remarkable because the Battle of Kosovo was fought on June 28, 1389.

  The soccer game stops. Play makes room for history, and the children begin to tell the story. Marko went to the bench near our patch of field and grabbed a drawing from the table. We’d been drawing pictures before the soccer ball came out and hadn’t had time to talk about them. The drawing belonged to Miroslaw. He was the littlest one in the group and better only than me at soccer. The pause in play must have been a relief to him. He reminded me of myself in middle school, always hoping the ball wouldn’t come my way. Miroslaw was eleven years old, with red cheeks and bright eyes, another child star born to the wrong epoch. Like many children, he stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he drew. He beamed when Marko held his picture up.

  It was a medieval scene. Rival armies faced each other beneath a stone tower. A man’s head rested on a pike. A frightening figure stood beside him with an axe. The drawing gave off a melancholy feeling, part Edward Gorey, part Caravaggio (Figure 1). The children began to tell the story, suffused with laughs and shouts.

  “The Muslims came to take the Serbs’ land,
” Marko said.

  “Murat,” the girl, Katja, added, citing the name of the Turkish Sultan who led the Ottoman army onto Serb land.

  Not wanting to be shown up—it was his drawing after all—Miroslaw quickly interjected the name of the leader of the Serbs, a noble called Lazar, a near saint in their eyes. The other youths repeated the two names, Murat and Lazar, and they sounded heavy with the repetition, shorthand for centuries of meaning to which I was not privy, to which I would never really be privy; this was not my story, as soccer was not my game. I don’t know when, but at some point as they told the story, we started kicking the ball again. Mostly they kicked it to each other and let me listen and watch. Murat and Lazar, they said again. Murat and Lazar, who met in battle on Kosovo Polje. The words sailed with the ball across the grass.

  There were other names, Vuk Brankovic, the traitor, and Milos, the hero. There are countless versions of this story, and they vary widely depending on who is doing the telling, an Albanian or a Serb. As these children told the story, it went like this:

  Murat and his armies invaded Kosovo, which was the holiest land for the Serbs, the birthplace of the Serbian Orthodox religion. Monasteries and churches dotted the region. Many of them still stand today, though fewer after the 1998 war and the riots in 2004 that left much of the nation’s treasures smoldering. Prince Lazar raised an army to defend the Serbian kingdom, but one of his noblemen, Vuk Brankovic, made a deal with the Turks.

  “He was a traitor,” Marko said with venom. “Without him maybe….” But he didn’t finish the sentence, the distant look on his face led me to believe he was imagining a Kosovo controlled by his people for six hundred years, a Kosovo where he was not in the minority, penned into fortified enclaves for his own safety, subject to the whims and rages of politicians and mobs. I wanted to ask him what he was going to say, but never got the chance. Eager Miroslaw continued with the story.

  During the battle, a brave knight named Milos managed to trick his way behind Turkish lines. Pretending to offer himself in service to Murat, he knelt to kiss the sultan’s hand. Instead, he stabbed Murat in the side, gravely wounding him.

  “He did this because of Brankovic,” Katja added. According to the kids, Brankovic betrayed Lazar, who was his father-in-law, by quitting the field at the height of the battle, thus allowing the Turks to penetrate the Serb lines, capture Lazar, and take control of Kosovo.

  “They captured Lazar, see,” Marko repeated, and pointed again to Miroslaw’s drawing. It was Lazar whose head decorated the point of the pike. At his death, Lazar became a martyr.

  “Tell him about the speech,” Stefan said. Stefan had not spoken much since the story began. He seemed far more concerned with the mechanics of soccer than the details of history, but the speech, that was the piece that lit him up. He stopped the game again and held the ball under his foot.

  “You do it,” Marko said and Stefan did not need to be told twice.

  “Before the battle,” Stefan said, “Lazar spoke to his soldiers. He told them that he would fight for their God, and win the Kingdom of Heaven. Lazar said: It is better to die in battle than to live in shame.”

  Stefan was visibly moved as he spoke these words. The others nodded, and gazed at Lazar in the drawing, frozen in crayon, having lost his head, having lost his kingdom.

  The way they told this story struck me in the same way they talked about the riots three months earlier that killed nineteen people. In mid-March, four Albanian children were playing by the banks of the fast moving river Ibar, near a Serbian village. The children entered the water, and three of them drowned. Immediately, rumors spread that the three children had been chased into the river by local Serb men with a dog. Speculation spread that that act was retaliation for the alleged gunning down of Serb children the previous summer by Albanian terrorists. Regardless, fury erupted in the Albanian community, with demonstrations throughout the country denouncing Serbian aggression. Those demonstrations quickly turned violent, and Serb homes and businesses became the targets of that violence. For the next three days, both Serb and Albanian mobs clashed, exchanging gunfire and tossing firebombs. More than 900 people were injured, 800 Serb houses, and 35 Orthodox churches were burned. Four thousand people lost their homes in three days.

  These children had waited out the violence in their homes, nervously anticipating the arrival of an angry mob, but their homes were spared. The riots were over, and they had occurred for a simple reason, the children explained.

  “The Albanians want to get rid of the Serbs so they can have Kosovo for themselves. That’s what they’ve always wanted.”

  They told the story of the riots they survived with less outrage or animation than they told the story of the Battle of Kosovo that happened over six hundred years ago. It was as if the children had been there themselves in the summer of 1389, with their own heads on pikes, as if their own kingdom had been lost and the riots in 2004 were just aftershocks. Nothing was lost in March that had not already been lost on the medieval battlefield. In a sense they were right, as many see the Battle of Kosovo as the turning point when the Ottoman Empire took control of Kosovo, so that today Serbs are outsiders in their homeland. This is the magic that nationalism works on children. It was not an abstract historical wrong these Serb children felt. They still felt the hurt that began six hundred years earlier. They felt the hurt in their parents’ humiliation, unable to find work in Kosovo. They felt it in the fear of Albanians, who surrounded them and penned them into the enclaves. They saw their current oppression as a result of their history, their ancient history. They made no mention of Serb discrimination against Albanians or of the campaign to cleanse Kosovo of the Albanians in 1998. It could well have been that they were kept somewhat ignorant of these events, as they would have been very small at the time. But Marko, at least, had lived in Pristina itself before the war. His family fled the anarchy and the reprisals against Serbs that swept the capital city after the NATO bombing allowed the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian guerilla organization, back into Pristina to take control of the country and put an end to the ethnic cleansing. For the Serb children, the myths of their people from centuries ago were as real to them as the armored vehicles on the road by their school today.

  What to make of these children in Kosovo who grew so moved by the telling of medieval history that they had to stop their game to make sure I understood their story, as if play would be impossible without this common narrative? What to make of these child soldiers in the Congo who roughhoused and laughed together only months after they had tried to kill each other? This was decidedly not how I imagined the children of war to be.

  This project began when I was in college. It started with an insomniac night, when I watched reruns at three a.m. An ad for Save the Children came on, and I changed the channel. I did not want to sponsor a child, or even see those pictures the ad would inevitably show me. There was little escape, however. They were everywhere. The children were all the same: they were fleeing and hungry, all rags and bones and pleading, innocent eyes. They were from Ethiopia, Sudan, Liberia, Gaza, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Haiti, and Colombia. They were from the Congo and Sri Lanka. They were from Sierra Leone and Northern Ireland and from Israel. Where they came from hardly mattered to the story. The children were usually devoid of context. Seeing them I learned nothing about the conflict, the culture, or the child.

  I had always thought of childhood as a kind of magical time, “a mythologized and privileged state,” as the Oxford anthropologist Jo Boyden calls it, kept separate from the workplace, the world of adults, the hardships of the adult world. I held a conviction that in order to have a healthy childhood, the young must be sheltered from the struggles they would later come to know as grown-ups, that the most essential conditions for “normal” development were safety and stability. I also began to observe the widespread belief that children were not competent to face many of the harsh realities of life. There was a conception that children, by the simple fact that
they are children, are “innocent in the ways of the world and incompetent in it.”

  Aside from the great pains that are taken to protect children from danger in the United States—look at the rubberizing of school playgrounds, the banning of tag, the flood of sanitizing gels in children’s knapsacks, as if germs and skinned knees are no longer acceptable parts of play, and, most pernicious, the banning of books, and blocking of the Internet in an effort to protect the innocence of children—there is a near total denial that children are protagonists in their own lives. When a young person gets into trouble, blame is spread between the parents, the media, and any other cultural influence that is in vogue at the time: video games, loud music, fashion, MySpace. When a young person does something prodigious or remarkable—shows a selfless compassion by organizing a clothing drive for hurricane victims or, like twelve-year-old Ilana Wexler speaking at the Democratic National Convention, expresses a political opinion—it is seen as cute and somewhat unexpected, as if children were not usually aware of events in the world around them. However, it would take a supreme act of will for children in much of the world to be unaware of events around them.

  Since World War II, children have become involved in wars in unprecedented ways. Jewish children were targeted by the Nazi death squads simply because they were children, and at the same time, Jewish youths fought with the partisans against Nazi occupation. Youths as young as twelve had to choose for themselves—pick up a gun and fight, or die in a gas chamber or ghetto. As David Rosen of Rutgers University notes, recruiters would often target orphans because their family ties had already been broken and they were less risk averse than children who still had family to lose. This practice is still in use today and is part of a well-developed doctrine of child-soldier use. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute observed that there are established “best-practices” and global teaching pathways for the training and use of child soldiers, involving elaborate propaganda programs and ingeniously cruel desensitization regimes. These groups of armed children go on to terrorize the civilian population, turning expected social roles upside down. From Liberian street gangs and Palestinian suicide bombers to Afghan child laborers and underage Congolese concubines, children play central roles in modern conflicts.