Bringing kids to battle

To be a child is to have spirit — it is to believe in love. But as adults, we have most certainly put an end to that.

Pakistan's Peoples Party-led government is being blamed for not taking action against the spread of sectarian violence in the country. Many militant groups operate freely in the country, despite being banned as terrorist organisations. It is an act of desperation when parents refuse to bury their children, begging the military to step in and put a stop to this violence. A photographer friend of mine has been sending me heart-wrenching photographs. One of his photographs has been doing the rounds on Facebook. It shows a freshly dug grave with a child's lifeless body draped in a white cloth. The child's father is crying inconsolably refusing to let go. He is lying beside the shrouded body, inside the dirt hole, hugging his child in death as he did in life. The other photograph is of a young girl sitting beside her sister's lifeless body. Scrawled on her face is, "Kill me, I am Shia."

When children start becoming barometers of our depravity, it signals an irreconcilable crack in our humanity. Recently, an Israeli soldier, Mor Ostrovski, caused global indignation with a photograph he published on a website. The photograph shows the cross hairs of a rifle aimed at the head of a Palestinian boy playing on some steps. The boy is oblivious of the sniper but the message of the image is clear: children are legitimate targets. It is an utterly dehumanising photograph. A group of Israeli Army veterans raising public awareness about life in the occupied territories, published this image, alongside another, and wrote: “This is what the occupation looks like. Both pictures are testaments to the abuse of power rooted in the military control of another people.”

In 2007, I was sent a link to a video of a 2007 US military helicopter strike in Baghdad that is known to have killed a dozen Iraqi civilians including two Reuters staff. The video, later posted on WikiLeaks, showed disturbing images and audio of the helicopter pilots firing live ammunition rounds at a group of innocent men and their rescuers. A camera mounted in the helicopter captures everything. The video clearly shows the helicopter circling a group of men on the ground identified by the pilots as insurgents — confusing both cameras and equipment carried by the Reuters photographers for guns and grenade launchers. The pilots open fire, immediately killing everyone. The pilots are then heard requesting permission to shoot at a van that arrives to assist the wounded men. “Come on, let us shoot”, a pilot's voice is heard. The pilots get permission to fire at the van. More civilians are shot at, including two children. “Well it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle”, the pilot's voice is heard saying.

The humanitarian organisation, Save the Children, has been releasing photographs of children who have been tortured in Syria. The organisation has collected disturbing testimony from Syrian refugees, who have exposed how children have been the targets of brutal attacks. Children have seen their parents and siblings killed in front of them and have witnessed and experienced torture. Justin Forsyth, Save the Children’s chief executive said, children are telling them of their schools "being bombed or tanks knocking down their houses. They’re telling us of relatives that have been killed by the army, of breaking into the house in the middle of the night, of watching their brother or sister or father being shot. They’re even telling us of children being tortured in prison; little children of only 10-years-old having their fingernails pulled out, even their fingers cut off. This is appalling, and it has to stop now.”

Do we remember what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from what we are as adults. It is to have spirit — it is to believe in love, to believe in the beautiful, to believe in self; it is to know that lions can be friends with sheep; it is about cats that smile and all things that are wild — for each child cherishes a shining goblet of magic within their tiny souls. But as adults, we have most certainly put an end to that. Innocence is dead.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 21^st, 2013.