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Printer-Friendly ModeInvisible Children fights good fight while U.S. government watches
October 12, 2009 —
Last year, the assistant director of University Housing, Nick Wagner, loaned me a book. Reading for fun had become for me like an ex-girlfriend: even though it was fun, I didn’t have time for it, so I had to leave it behind and felt guilty for doing so and missed it. Nick convinced me to rekindle the fire. I borrowed Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. My father grew up in Nigeria, and I was aware that child soldiering existed, but not until reading the graphic stories from this book did I understand well enough the full extent of the horror of it, and maybe I still don’t. I recommend that anybody whose relationship with reading has fallen apart go back and try again with this book. And if you are one of those reading virgins stalking around campus, this wouldn’t be a bad first-time experience. Even if you decide reading is horrible, you will be a better person for having read this book.
Beah, like thousands of other children, had his family ripped from him and was given an ultimatum when he was just a young teenager: kill or die. He spent the next years of his life on an unrelenting cocaine high with an assault rifle and a machete, killing dozens of people each week. While this particular story happened in Sierra Leone, child-soldiering isn’t confined to that country or even to Africa. The destruction on innocence that has been wrought by child-soldiering is a crap-stain on the history of humanity.
Last week, an organization known as Invisible Children came to SVSU to speak out against child soldiering in Uganda. While the documentaries they presented seemed just as concerned with telling the story of how the founders — “just a normal group of friends from California”— started the organization as it did with showing the atrocities of child soldiering, the important message got across to the audience: something had to be done to stop the kidnapping and conscription of Ugandan children by rebel armies. Those elevenyear- olds who are enslaved not in a sweatshop or a fruit field but behind a gun must be freed.
Some of the schools the Invisible Children “Schools for Schools” program built, through which a high school or university in the U.S. may sponsor a school in Uganda, have been forced to relocate. There is a simple dynamic that allows rebel armies to thrive the way they do: the national governments in these areas do not have the resources to protect rural villages, so they focus their protection to cities. Children are being kidnapped from small towns and villages in the country, far away from the Ugandan national military. Children are fleeing the countryside to find protection in the cities, even if safety means living on the streets and sleeping in abandoned buildings. The most effective project that the IC organization could undertake would be to construct massive boarding schools in Ugandan cities, providing children with a place to live, work and get an education, away from the dangers of being kidnapped by rebel armies. Building schools in small rural villages creates inviting targets for conscript-hungry insurgents and will likely leave the willing educators vulnerable to getting their hands chopped off for “indoctrinating the youth.”
It shames my patriotism to acknowledge that the IC’s petitioning of American politicians is also probably a vain effort. The documentary showed the young humanitarians talking with three different Republican representatives, asking what they could do for the children enslaved in Uganda. Though none of those representatives might have said it, the answer is this: nothing. Until we are out of Iraq and Afghanistan and the tides of War on Drugs take a turn in the U.S.’ favor, Uganda will be low on the list of priorities. Politicians are not likely to simply explain that humanitarianism is no longer a part of U.S. foreign policy, especially since the disaster of Mogadishu (watch Black Hawk Down). More importantly, it isn’t the politicians’ fault that this is the case. It’s Americans who put the kibosh on helping out the world’s poor and oppressed. We are all for sending in troops to help until a coffin or two comes home with a young Marine inside; it reminds us that there is a cost to military intervention that most Americans remember they aren’t willing to pay. The willingness to pay that cost is what must be created by encouraging people to read books such as “A Long Way Gone”, to watch movies such as Voces Inocentes, and to not change the channel when the news turns to Africa. With that, maybe someday there won’t be a need for organizations such as Invisible Children. Or, they could bury a few million barrels of oil in Uganda.