From: ronaldd@cbnewse.cb.att.com (ronald.h.davis)
Subject: news from mozambique: lost generation of mozambique youth
Organization: AT&T
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1992 00:23:43 GMT
Summary: pretty gruesome story

newsfeed from igc peacenet:


Topic 194       Mozambique's Lost Generation
hrcoord hr.child         4:17 pm  Nov  9, 1992

World Press Review
November 1992

(c) 1992 The Stanley Foundation

MOZAMBIQUE'S LOST GENERATION

by Angela Neustatter
The Independent
London, United Kingdom

The first time 12-year-old Manuel killed anybody, he took a bayonet
and rammed it into the belly of an old woman. His companion, Carlos,
13, cut the throat of a young man held prisoner by the banditos. Luisa,
11, remembers the terror when she and her family woke to hear screaming
and shouting: "I was with my mother and father, my sister and three
brothers, and we ran from the hut...We lived in the bush for two years.
We know that we could not survive if we did not plant some field, but 
we had no tools. My father tried to return to the village to get his
knife. He didn't come back. We found his body near a road. He had been
stabbed with a bayonet. After that, we were afraid to leave our place
in the bush. We made small huts and survived on roots and whatever food
we could find."

These are the terrible tales of everyday life for the children in
Mozambique. It is estimated that almost half of the nation's children
are victims of the civil war, in which they are a direct target of the
Mozambique National Resistance Movement (Renamo). It is a war that
attracts little attention these days, but its atrocities equal those of
Cambodia's Pol Pot, according to Eima Barr, a field worker for UNICEF
in Mozambique's embattled Zambezia province, who describes children
being routinely forced to kill their own parents and siblings, to watch
as pregnant women's bellies are slit open and the babies carved out,
to see men having their genitals sliced off before being ordered to
eat them. Childhood here means the ever-present fear that the banditos,
as the Renamo soldiers are widely known, will raid your village,
shooting those who try to escape, gang-raping girls and women, burning
down homes with people inside. In these raids, children as young as six
are captured and taken to the military bases - which, for the boys,
usually means being forcibly trained as soldiers and ordered to kill,
as Manuel and Carlos were. For the girls, it means being "wives" and
domestic workers to the Renamo soldiers.

Four years ago, the Mozambican government decided that it must find
ways to help this generation of traumatized children. Under the
guidance of British psychiatrist Naomi Richman, employed by the Save
the Children Federation, Mozambique's Ministry of Education drew up a
rehabilitation progrmam for use in the schools. This seemed the most
effective way to reach the maximum number of children.

One of the most pressing jobs for the teachers is to help the children
relearn a moral code. Free of their Renamo captors, the children often
distance themselves from other people. Some exist in a withdrawn,
incommunicative state that suggests deepest despair; others, say Richman,
are restless and aggressive, lose their tempers, and become violent
when they fail to resolve some conflict. Teacher Maria Gertrude talks
of slow but measurable improvement. "I see children calm down or open
up," she says. "I see them smile - small, uncertain smiles at first,
and then one day they laugh. I laugh, too, on those days; it seems
such an achievement."

Nobody is making great claims, recognizing that what they can do is limited
by resources, and, most of all, by the war itself. But they must keep
trying. "Who else will help our children?" asks Ethel Vina, head of
social welfare in Zambezia province. "They must grow up to take charge
of the country, to parent their own children. And I wonder how they
can do that unless in some way they can come to terms with the terrible
things that have been done. People here talk of a lost generation, but 
we cannot afford to lose a generation."

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