Special Hearings — Children's Hearings — 1997-06-12

UNKNOWN: Thank you.  Well, I am very honoured today to be able to share with you some of the lessons and experiences and somehow the great pain I have to go through about two and a half years, when the Secretary General asked me to undertake what was known in the history of the UN as the Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children.
 The reason why I was appointed, are indeed very bad reasons.  It is because I am Mozambiqan, so I come from a country which have gone through a very painful process more than a decade.  The Secretary General knew that I had the experience myself of dealing with children victims of war.
 So I was a bad reference, and because of that I was chosen to lead this process.  But I decided that we should transform this maybe as a good reason.  Being that for the first time we will have the opportunity to give to those who have been victims, to outline what they have gone through and more than that, to help the international community to shape a new frame of how to deal with these problems.
 And that would include in the philosophy and the programs and planning of the United Nations, inputs which would have come from those who have suffered.
 So I am not sure whether I managed to do that, but I tried to put myself in the position of the children of Mozambique and from that, to broaden that to the children of the world who have suffered from conflict.  My responsibility was to try to give them a voice and to give them a face.
 So I am very pleased that South Africa is probably, if it is not the first, but among the first countries to implement one of the recommendations we have made to the United Nations, to say give a face to children.  Give visibility to children.  And give priority to children.
 I my experience, this is one of the few experiences where children will be given a platform so that the nation, and even the international community will have to sit and listen.  In other words, we have moved from the kind of things in which we adults would try to speak on behalf of children, and we don't acknowledge their rights to participate in debate, in the shaping of what is their lives, what is their future.
 So I am glad that this morning, I will not only speak to South Africans, but I particularly try to bring experiences of children from around the world, some of them whom I have managed to interact with.   But before that, maybe I will outline some of the general conclusions we have come to.
 You may know that at the beginning of this century, when most of the conflicts were inter-State, only about 10 percent of casualties were civilians, 90 percent of casualties were soldiers.  But what we have learnt recently is that in the type of conflict which I call internal conflict, like the one that took place in this country, we witnessed a shift, a complete shift.  90 Percent of casualties are civilians and only 10 percent are soldiers.  In other terms, it means that wars nowadays are against civilians, are against defenceless people in villages, in streets, in schools, everywhere.  But people who are not necessarily part of institutions.
 And this has provoked two major problems.  The change of the patterns of conflict has also resulted in victimisation of the most vulnerable of the civilians.  You might have heard that half of refugees in the world, are children.
 And about the rest of them, will be mostly women, elderly and of course some also, some men.  But women and children became the most groups, social groups which are affected by the type of conflict we face today.  
 Another aspect is that in these conflicts, nothing, but absolutely nothing is spared.  You break the boundaries of what is sacred, what is untouchable.  In these conflicts nothing is sacred, nothing is untouchable.
 Human beings themselves are the first target.  And I will describe about children, but families are disrupted.  Places of worship like churches, are no longer respected.  Even sources of water, crops, schools, clinics, whatever is found, it is a target and that is why this war is against whatever is the indication of organised life.
 So the objective is not only to target individuals, but to disrupt the whole of communities, the whole of the nations, the whole of what is organised life.  
 And in that, it makes it even more difficult on how and what to repay and how to repay.  But my task is to try to share with you how children have been targeted.  
 In the past children were found where caught up in terms of what we can call cross-fire.  So it was accidental.  No matter how many there were killed, but it was accidental, they were not the targets.  But in the conflicts of the recent decades, children are deliberately targeted for killings and you will ask why?
 Some people would even argue that maybe it is not so targeted.   A child is seen as a continuation of the other sides, because most of these conflicts are ethnic or they are religious.  Of course the reasons are much more deep than those, but apparently they seem to be ethnic.
 So when you target the children of the other side, you are eliminating the future enemy who would be able to attack you.  So in the process of kind of ethnic cleansing, it is important to eliminate those who tomorrow can challenge you in powersharing.
 But more than that, is that if you want to touch and to break the moral of the community you are attacking, then you have to attack what is most precious to them.  And in your view as adults, if they kill your child, you become completely disturbed and you will never be the same again.
 So there were two things, one is what they represent in future, but it is how they are powerful means of attacking the adults in their emotional stability and even in their capacity to resist.  So children are being targeted.
 I can give examples, here in South Africa, you know schools were deliberately attacked and children were killed, and it was not by chance.  In Mozambique it happened countless times, schools were deliberately attacked, and they knew that in those schools there were primary school children of six, seven, eight, ten years.  So there is no confusion there, it is deliberate.
 We found this in all the places we have gone through. You have heard about stories in Ruwanda, but we found it in Gambodje, we found it in Bosnia, we found it in Lebanon.  Children as a specific target, but also sometimes children are specifically target for maiming, it is even more sadistic.  Not to kill them, but just to make them disabled.
 And they become a problem for the family and the community, for the rest of their lives.  So the suffering is even constant, it is permanent, because that child will be a reminder of what the conflict, even when the conflict is over, this child will come to be a problem for its family and the community, so maiming is another specific objective of how to reach the enemy the other side.
 You also know that in many countries, land mines are a big problem.  Here in South Africa I think we are fortunate, we don't have so much of that problem.  But in the region in the other parts of the world, land mines are targeting civilians, and particularly of course they target children and women.
 Other ways of targeting children is detention in torture.  Children are suspected of being spies as they call them, they want to take information from them and then detention and torture.  We have the worst cases, we have witnessed during this study is in Ruwanda.  
 I visited a prison where it was impossible to move, because it was so packed and I said I want to see children and they were packed in a very small, very, very small room as an attempt to separate them from adults.
 And of course you can imagine a child of 13, one of them I spoke to him, I said why are you here and he said, I killed.  I said how did you kill and why did you kill?  I said why did you kill and he said because he was, this child is a Hooto so he killed Tootsies.  I said but aren't they, those people were not your neighbours for instance, or your neighbours or at school, and he said yes, until the day that I did not know that they were my enemies.
 This is an example of another dimension of targeting children, it is propaganda.  It is how you take a child who has lived with his colleagues, with his friends, with his neighbours, then you introduce a new element of suspicion to say if you don't kill him, he will kill you.
 And a child will know no boundary in this, he will do whatever and that happened in Ruwanda, that happened in Bosnia.  Children killing their friends, killing their neighbours, their colleagues in schools.
 Why is it so easy to do that?  It is because the personality of a child is still in development and whatever you want to make of a child, you can make it if you infuse ideals and principles which can motivate the child to respect nothing in life.
 I will come back to this later, but when you have a child who is unable to respect his friend, you can imagine how deep the crisis has come.  Because children can communicate even without speaking the same language.  We adults cannot do that, but children can.  They know how to develop solidarity, even without speaking the same language.
 But when you take them to the stage when they don't respect a friend, then you will see this child can do anything in life, will never respect whatever is a human life.
 One of the targeting of children also is to make them witness atrocities.  Witnessing their own parents being killed in a very brutal way.  And when that happens, it means that that child is shattered from inside and it can produce two things.  One is a strong sense of revenge.  This child will live the rest of his or her life saying, I have to revenge.  So the purpose of life has been completely deviated, not to be himself, but he will live for revenge.
 But it can also produce another thing, it is that this child will never be able to reconcile and to understand the meaning of normal life.  It will be traumatised from inside and will become a weak person, because he cannot reconcile with what he has witnessed.
 But the worst of targeting of children is what I am coming to now.  It is to take children to participate themselves in atrocities.  You have heard about the so-called child soldiers.  It is a phenomena which is wide-spread all over the world in places.  I think you have heard what is happening in Sri Lanka today.
 You could have heard what is happening in Columbia today.  But Ruwanda which I have mentioned, (indistinct) in Gambodje is still using children for atrocities.
 That is to mean it is a world wide phenomena in which those who are behind this kind of violence, they know that the best way to attack is to plant the seeds of violence in new generations.
 It means to transfer the conflict of today, to two or three generations which will come.  When you instrumentalise children of seven, six and even ten years, you can be sure that they will find it very difficult during the rest of their lives, to live without violence.   They will find it very difficult to be I mean, stable adults, to be parents.
 And of course if they have difficulties in parenting, their children also will suffer for the effects of the conflict today.  So more than themselves, to use them as instruments, is a way of planting the seeds of this conflict for the time to come.  That is why today we are sitting here to discuss reconciliation and reparation.
 South Africa has found a peaceful transition, but the effects of what has happened to our children, we are going to live with for more decades to come.  Not only in this country, but wherever.
 So the diabolic kind of conflicts in targeting children to instrumentalise them, it means to transfer, to plant and to transfer this conflict to be dealt with maybe 50 years later.  I happen to have spoken to somebody who had been a child at the time of the end of the second world war.
 For any reason they were given only now an opportunity to talk about what they have witnessed.  He would speak about this as if it had happened yesterday, but it 50 or 50 something years later.
 It means the wounds can look like as if they have been healed, but they are still very fresh.  When they have an opportunity, they can come up again.
 So we must be aware that even when we seem to have reached a kind of normality in our life, we have to know how do we bring these things to deal with, in a constructive way so that we are not going to come much later in different capacities.
 But participation of children in atrocities is the worst of really breaking the boundaries of respect of human life.  It is no wonder that in this country, we are having very high rates of criminality.  Some people can just because they want a car, or because they want a cellphone, they can kill.  It doesn't make sense.
 Because yes, you can attack somebody and take his cellphone, but you don't need to kill him.  Why is it that it became so normal for me to get a cellphone, I have to kill the owner of the cellphone, it is exactly because these boundaries of what is the meaning and the value of human life, has been broken completely.
 Anything is worth a human life and this is probably one of the most difficult problems we have to readdress is how do you bring back our youngsters to understand the value of human life, to respect it, to cherish human life.
 But they came to this place exactly because of what has happened to them some time ago and they lost that sense.  One of the ways of targeting children, which was very clear in Bosnia is to use education as a means of divide.  It his country also it did happen.
 The Bantu education and the separation of people in races and even in tribes, it has entrenched discrimination in the minds of people from the age when they are really very young, and they grew up looking at themselves as White, and even not only to be White, as Afrikaner, as English speaking, as Portuguese speaking, even amongst Whites.
 But the qualification of a South African citizen today he looks at himself and he says I am African, or I am Afrikaner and I am a White South African.  Why do you need to be a White South African?
 The normal thing would be to say I am South African, but it is so entrenched and it has become so normal.  We deal with this as if it is a normal thing.  But every one in this country grew and developed with the perception of what makes him different from others, and not on the basis of what make us equal.
 To develop the platform of common ground.  We were so bombarded by this kind of division and discrimination that now our perception is that I am an African and he is White and he is Indian and that one is - and that amongst African, he is Xhoza, Zulu and never, in the basis of we belong to the same nation, we have the same origin and we have the same destiny.
 It seems to be a very simple thing, but it is so deep in the way society itself had been organised and in Bosnia it is exactly the same thing.
 They look at themselves as Muslim, as Croates and whatever and they find it very, very difficult to chancily and to come together and to accept even to live together.  But this is infused in the minds and the ways of living, slowly step by step and then it becomes culture.
 I think one of the challenges that we have is how do we overcome this culture.  And we accept ourselves as sons and daughters of the same nation in which we have these meaning of being a South African.
 But it happens in many parts of the world.  Let me talk about another important thing I think is happening also, it is the disruption of family life.  
 Attacking not only individuals in the family, but creating a situation in which fathers, mothers and children will never be able to look at each other with pride.  When you attack a family and you humiliate the head of the family in the presence of his wife and his children, you destroy the sense of a protective force which exists in the family.
 If you do that, the erosions of the family equation has been planted and he himself, he will be insecure for the rest of his life in terms of what he is able to protect his family.
 And the members of the family they will have touched the ground of the sense of powerlessness, is that what you say - yes.   But they even do worse - rape and sexual violence is used as a means to humiliate everyone amongst the family.
 Raping women and girls in the presence of the rest of the members of the family and even in the presence of neighbours.  It means that woman and that girl will never be able to look at his father and his brother the same way and they also will find it very difficult to look at her.
 In African culture, coming to this, the woman is the mother of the family, is a kind of how do I say, is the depository of what is the dignity of the family.  And women become, that is why in our culture, women were protected from participating in whatever could be violence.
 Women could not touch blood in our culture, that is why they were given a rear guard position, because whatever is culture and values has to be protected by them.  So they could never touch what is considered as blood in conflict.
 But when you break these boundaries and you bring a woman to the theatre of conflict and you humiliated this woman in the presence of the rest of the community, then there is nothing left.
 This is one way they used this, and rape is a common feature of all the countries we have gone through.  The study recommended that only in the case of Bosnia and Ruwanda, it had been considered a war crime and we said no, now it should be a war crime in any circumstances in which a conflict is taking place, when rape is used as a weapon of war.
 But we also see, I mean forms of disruption of family life in detention of parents and where you leave children alone.  I don't need to give examples in this country.  But you also have another experience in this country, it is the migrant labour Act.
 Many men were obliged to come and live around Johannesburg because of the mining industry, right?  And sometimes we just take this as for granted, but it means that hundreds, if it is not millions of families they never had a normal family life, with the husband and mother and the children together.
 Children grew up in a  situation where they see the father as a visitor, he comes in and out, but he is not the head of the family and of course he has no authority.  I mean to give guidance to his children and these children will grow only and the children of their mother, where the father is just someone who becomes so frustrated many times, he will stay there, he will drink, but he has no demurral authority to bring up his own children.
 But the disruption of family life also has been achieved through the massive displacement of people.    I don't know how far this problem is, but in many other countries, displacement and refugees has provoked situations where you have children and parents lost from one another in the confusion of the conflict.
 Of course not talking of uprooting them from their place of origin and culturally where they are able to live together as a family, but displacement and refugees in which I have referred already, the majority of refugees and displaced, are children.  It means these children are separated from their families.
 So how do we deal with all these problems?    I don't know.  I tried to mention some, because I could go on and on.  Maybe before that, I will refer just to other ways of how conflict impacts of children.
 It is education.  Most children lose the opportunity to attend a school and no one can measure what it means to lose an opportunity to develop your intellect as you could have done it.  If you just grow illiterate, because someone decided that you shouldn't have an opportunity to open up, to use science as an instrument of living better, we have found that in every country in conflict, not only because schools are burnt and destroyed, but also because of deviation of resources through war, then you have millions of children who are left out of school and of course then they are very easy to find in the streets.
 You easily find child prostitution and you find many other problems.  It is an indirect effect, but it is directly linked to the situation of conflict.  
 Health.  You have millions of children who never have an opportunity to see a Doctor, to be treated and of course the rates of infant mortality and preventable disease increase dramatically in situations of conflict as a direct effect of that situation.  
 So not only children are killed directly by shooting and shells and land mines, but indirectly because of the rates of infant mortality provoked by the deviation of resources.
 I would say that in a situation of conflict actually, every right of a child is at risk.  It is violated.  So if we are to come to discuss, how do we discuss reconciliation, prevention and reparation which is the mandate of this Commission.
 I think in this country the range and the duration and the depth of it, it hardly makes it easy to say that this country will be able to repay what has happened.
 At least it is going to take a long time.  I think it is important to know that the truth to come up is a first step to know what has happened and how it happened.
 But then the consequences of this, it may mean restructuring not only from laws to how do you organise services and how you build capacities, and how you deal with this, coming not only at the institutional level as the Minister of Education, the Minister of Health, the Minister of Social Welfare, Justice and economic opportunities, but even going to see how do we reinforce the family life.
 How do we help families to come together and to exercise the protective role families need to give to children.  In other terms, how to give every child a shelter in the guard of a protective family?  We have rates of street children in this country which are not so small and in every country which has gone through an experience like this, you will find the same situation.
 And the challenge is how then do we help these children to find, it is not directly there by logical parents, but someone who is adult to care, to given them a protective shelter and guidance.
 But also we need to give them opportunities for education.  It may not be lost completely, but education in these cases, it does not mean only the possibility to go back to school.  It is important to go to school, to have training so that they can self-employ themselves, if it is possible.  But also it is the content of education we get.
 It is how through the system of education, we repair the damage of the entrenched discrimination and racism which has been implanted through the system along the decades.
 How do you give back a call of values in which not only did children respect human life, but also organised life which has been disrupted and at the same time, they can build a community sense of belonging to a family, to a community, to the nation.
 How do you help these children to live within a certain kind of principles and norms, social norms which are going to readdress the kind of deviations in their personalities and perceptions which has been developed for many years.
 So school is a major instrument of rebuilding from inside and developing also the sense of belonging and developing skills to live in dignity.  That is a challenge.
 Then we can also say is it possible to do this and repair completely and even in the terms of, I know this is very controversial, people are discussing in this country whether you can have reconciliation without justice, when I say justice, I am not talking of how to take the perpetrators to court, no, it is how do you build a just system in the way of living in which people will feel that all of us together as a nation, we are building a society in which justice prevails.
 It is not possible, I don't think in any case of the countries I have visited, you can exercise the kind of individual justice.  It is completely unrealistic, because the depth of damage is so big.  It reaches almost everybody.
 So the way around is how do you build a society in which everyone feels that we are building a way of living and sharing which gives us a sense of justice.
 How to debate this, I don't know.  Some of the children and youngsters will say after all this I am especially entitled to have a kind of reparation, that is correct.  You can do it, but the fact is how many children and youngsters will be able to bring them to the knowledge of every one of us to repay.
 We will have some cases in which we will be able to deal with, and then the point is how through these, we try to reach a kind of responding to the needs of the thousands or millions of those who will not be able to come to light and to speak individually.
 So there is a problem of how do you deal with it individually, but in collective way which touches those who probably we won't be able to identify as such.  It is a challenge, I don't know.
 But I am also concerned to see how the judiciary system takes care of children who commits any kind of infractions.  Which in many cases are related to their backgrounds.   In each case it is always important to look what is the background of the family and what is the background of upbringing of this child.  
 How do we take that into account.  But prevention is mostly important in saying how do we deal with the past so that the future is not going to have a process of coming back with a different face or with different ways, but how do we make sure that never, never again in this country, in this region actually I can say, how do we make sure that this is not going to happen again?
 Is it that a citizen, an individual, a child, a woman, a man be humiliated or be brutalised as it happened.  The challenge I have no indications of how to do that, but I think far beyond the mandates of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this is a debate which has to take place in various levels.  How to make sure that this does not happen again.
 And finally, I would like to say that a healthy society in my understanding will be achieved and judged from the way that society treats its own children.
 So we accept that we are still unhealthy society as a result of our recent history, but if we are to become healthy, the priority of how to concentrate on healing, in repairing and build a healthy future, it depends on what we are going to do to our children.
 Again, I finalise my remarks saying give your children a voice, the right to speak out.  Give your children the right to have a visibility, not the statistics to say you have how many children, how many youngsters, but to have a face and to have a visibility and finally to have priority in whatever is as economic and social development.   
 We should ask ourselves how much and how we are giving priority to our children as a way of repairing the past and also as a way of preventing the past of happening again.  Thank you.