Kids can be the most murderous ‘soldiers’ in any insurgent army

You must have noticed yesterday’s frontpage streamer headline, stating that the US Department of Labor has said children under the age of 18 have been recruited into terrorist organizations here, including the Abu Sayyaf and the Communist New People’s Army. This assertion is part of the US agency’s report on "child labor" throughout the world.

Our own government sources note that more than 10 percent of the armed fighters of the NPA are minors belonging to the above category.

The fact is that we didn’t need the US Department of Labor to reveal to us what has been known for years about the insurgency. Rebel cadres recruit kids by giving them guns, which endow them with a sense of power. To the barrio youngsters, or those from depressed areas, the prospect of swaggering around with a sidearm or rifle is irresistible. What makes child "guerrillas" or cadres dangerous is that they have no qualms about killing, and also consider themselves "invincible." Death is what happens to other people, not to them.

If you watch cable TV and the global news networks, you surely witnessed countless newsreels about children being dragooned into fighting in the ranks of rebel forces in Africa. This is true in the Philippines, too – and neither the NPA nor Moro insurgent leaders have to "force" them to join.

When we were covering the Vietnam War, as well as the fighting in Cambodia, we journalists were constantly on the look-out for child-cadres among the Viet Cong or the Khmer Rouge. In combat, they were always the most merciless. To them, killing the enemy was child’s play. Newsmen and photographers I knew in Vietnam, all of them veterans of that conflict, always cautioned newcomers to think twice before "surrendering" if they spotted kids or youngsters in the group of Viet Cong they encountered. The child-guerrillas were the most likely to shoot if you came out of the brush or the treeline with your hands up, calling out "bao chi", meaning "journalist." The older cadres were more careful.

In our country, kids in urban areas play all those violent video games, and come to believe that those knocked down in the "game" spring back to life after the game ends, ready to resume fighting when a new game is punched in. This, however, doesn’t happen in real life – but those city kids, their instincts already inured to violence don’t care.

Summing up: Of course the NPA recruits children – not merely as fighters but as assassins. Who would expect an innocent-looking kid of planning to shoot one in the back?

* * *

One egregious example is the Palestinian suicide-bomber, who doesn’t decide on a "martyrdom" attack on Israelis on the impulse or fervor of the moment, but is actually "prepared" from childhood for his mission for Allah.

One of them, a youth named "Ali" recounted his story to Joyce M. Davis, the Deputy Foreign Editor of the Knight Ridder newspapers. Ali said that as a boy and teenager, he spent several weeks each year in marching, singing patriotic songs, and gaining skill in shooting Kalashnikovs (AK-47 rifles).

This basic military training and lessons in discipline would later be harnessed by Islamic teachers.

Davis wrote that the "boys did not need to be motivated to fight for their people. The misery of life in the camps, the visibility of their parents’ suffering, and the presence of Israeli troops in their village do a good job of it . . . Most Palestinian youths have heard their mothers cry over lost homes and have watched Israeli troops carting off their fathers and brothers to jail."

One of the best-known organizers, al Makdah proved talkative to Editor Davis. He said that when he "decides it is time for a young man to go on a martyrdom mission, he decides where the young man should strike, provides help with transportation, assigns people to aid in the mission, and helps the prospective martyr prepare a last message to his family."

"Here’s an example of a video that we also do, if they want that," al Makdah said, presenting Davis with an unmarked black video casette done to commemorate one of the istishhadis.

In her book, MARTYRS, Davis describes what the video contains: ". . . a young man of about 20 stands facing the camera, his forehead covered with a green headband with Qur’anic script dedicating himself to God. With triumphant music in the background, he declared his intention to die as a shaheed and asked for God’s blessings that his mission be successful. The youth appeared calm and resolute, and his final words were interspersed with pictures of Palestinians in battle scenes, firing rockets from barren hilltops, apparently at Israeli soldiers below. There was not the slightest hint of hesitation . . ."

Al Makdah asserts he has "trained martyrs of all ages, from 16 to 65 years old." Mind you, his training base is not in Palestine but in Lebanon, in the largest Palestinian refugee camp near the southern port of Sidon.

What prompted the British police and M-I5 to crack down, without delay, on the suspects they say were plotting to plant bombs on commercial airliners bound from airports in the UK like Heathrow and Gatwick to the United States? According to a report in The New York Times last August 29, the decision was made when, on August 9, police discovered two young Muslim men, in a second-floor apartment in East London, had recorded a video justifying their "suicide plot" to blow up trans-Atlantic planes. The motive they stated was revenge against the US and its ‘accomplices,’ Britain and the Jews."

"As you bomb, you will be bombed: as you kill, you will be killed," said one of the men on his "martyrdom" video-tape. The youth added that he hoped Allah would be "pleased with us and accepts our deed." As it happened, the article revealed, the police had already been monitoring the apartment with hidden video and audio equipment.

NYT correspondents Don Van Natta Jr. and Elaine Sciolino wrote that "the virulent language of seven recovered martyrdom videotapes is among new details that emerged from interviews with high-ranking British, other European and American officials . . . demonstrating that the suspects had made considerable progress toward planning a terrorist attack."

Scotland Yard dispatched policemen along with M-I5 operatives to arrest 21 suspects in the early hours of August 10. Most of them were British-born citizens of Pakistani origin. Why Pakistanis? I had a long session with our friend, Pakistan’s Ambassador Muhammad Naeem Khan about this phenomenon – shortly after he invited me for a 10-day working visit to his country (from Karachi, to Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad and Peshawar – the latter the crossroads of jihadi training and intrigue, one of my favorite haunts in my younger days). Instead, I’m sending our Executive Editor Amy Pamintuan on this government invitational – if we can recover her half-frozen from Iceland, Greenland, or wherever she is at this moment. (Not in London with La Gloria to sip tea with royalty?)

In any event, returning to the subject at hand, it was those suicide video-tapes, similar to those put on the website by suicide-bombers in Palestine and Lebanon – and, lately, the release by al-Qaeda of a "martyrdom" video made by one of the hijackers before he and his companions seized an airplane to crash into the World Trade Center on 9/11. The eerie message was: Death to you Infidels, crusaders and Jews, and Allah Akhbar (God is great!).

I wish God could be great without His martyrs killing so many helpless people.

* * *

Journalist Richard Ben Cramer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Middle East reporting in 1979 (his articles appeared in TIME, Newsweek, and The New York Times Magazine) asks a pertinent question in his book, How Israel Lost (Simon & Schuster, London, Toronto, 2004).

How can it happen (as the Jews so often ask) that a Palestinian mother celebrates at the funeral of her son, a suicide bomber: "How could a mother be like that?" the Israelis wail.

Cramer reports of the Israeli reaction that "they have to keep a simple explanation at the ready, such as "They’re animals," or "human life means nothing to them," or, "Well, it’s just different when we have one child or two in the family, and they have 12. They’ll just make more children!"

"But," Cramer opines, "it is never said – in conversation, on TV, or in the Hebrew newspapers – that the mother of a ‘martyr-bomber’ has no choice. It is a matter of honor . . . In fact, the honor of a woman and her family is all (and almost only) about her sons. It is her duty and destiny to produce sons for the tribe . . . which is why, after she gives birth (say, to a first son named Khaled), her own name will forever recede, while she is called by her kin (and by her neighbors, and every shopkeeper) Umm Khaled – Mother of Khaled."

"That’s also," the author notes, " – as Americans ask – why all those Palestinian commandos show up in the papers with those wacky names – impossible for a proper Yank to keep straight – Abu This and Abu That. ‘Abu’ simply means, ‘Father of . . .’"

In short, Cramer concludes: "The mother of a suicide bomber may mourn and cry for her son forever. But if she isn’t seen at his funeral making the sound of joy – a high trilling noise from the back of the throat, the same sound she would have made at his wedding – then she would not be seen to accept the honor of his death for the family. If she would not tell the TV cameras, when she’s interviewed afterward, that she is proud of her dead son – that she would give all her sons – then she dishonors her whole tribe’s struggle and her family, altogether. She would be stripping the honor of her kin, of her name, of her own life (and her son’s) . . . it is unthinkable."

If a mother sobs and weeps, she must do so in private. Doing so in public would be unforgivable.

* * *

This journalist has been to Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt several times since the mid-1960s. I’ve spoken to Israelis and Palestinians (not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but in Lebanon and other Arab countries). The way I see it, peace may never be in prospect.

On the part of the Jews, it was inevitable that the assassinated peace leader, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, once one of the Israeli Defense Forces’ most ferocious and most-decorated generals, would be murdered by a young Jewish zealot. As for the Palestinians, can they ever reconcile with Israel? For two generations they’ve lived in squalor and pain in refugee camps (other Arab societies simply refuse to integrate them) dreaming of their return to recover the homes seized by the Jews from them or their parents, fighting for the triumphant recovery of their "ancestral land." There is too much blood on the ground, there have been too many betrayals, too many dashed hopes, too much angst and accusation on either side.

Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, after negotiating with Adolf Hitler in Munich, declared jauntily when he returned to London that he had achieved "Peace in our time." This delusion was soon rudely shattered by Hitler’s legions and Panzerwagen smashing into Poland, raucously singing, "Ade Polenland!"

In the Middle East, particularly in Israel and Palestine, there seems to be no hope of peace at any time – whether today or in the future. Chamberlain, although he went down in political disgrace, at least could briefly be deluded. In the Holy Land, no illusions seem to be left – only a legacy of hatred passed on from one generation to the next.

Am I too pessimistic? David Ben Gurion once said, you cannot believe in Israel unless you believe in miracles. I don’t see any Miracle coming – but God moves in mysterious ways, we were taught from childhood.