War babies by Jackie McGlone,
The Herald Magazine, Glasgow, February 9 2002
Juanita looked just like any other seven-year-old, dark and plump, with tight black curls, except that she would always sit alone, refusing to play with other children, sometimes watching them, but mostly just staring at the dirt floor. Her face showed no expression, no feeling. She looked numb and disconnected.
It took weeks to work out what had happened to this pretty little girl. She couldn't tell her story all at once. It came out in fragments, like the jumbled pieces of a jigsaw, but the vital piece that would unlock the puzzle was always missing. When people talked to her, her mind wandered. Sometimes, she cried and cried, and she had to stop talking, stop remembering. Gradually and painfully, Juanita's story emerged as she played with some rag dolls and wooden toys.
Although deeply distressed, she began to mumble, speaking through the toys. The child and her family - her father, mother and sister - had been travelling along a road in Colombia on their donkey cart when a helicopter circled overhead. The noise was deafening. The family were frightened and stopped the cart. They ran to hide in the banana fields. She was with her mother and sister; her father on the opposite side of the road.
The helicopter landed some way off. One of the men from it found her father. Juanita, her mother and sister stayed hidden but they saw everything. She watched them drag her father out of the field and she bent the tiny, cloth arms of the doll behind his head, just the way her father's arms had been placed. The commander of the armed men pushed her father onto the ground, face down. Then he took out a gun and shot him three times.
Every time she demonstrated how the rag man went "pow!" with his gun, his body jumped with the force of his weapon. The murdered man's wife and daughters watched helplessly from their hiding places as the men left. Juanita gathered the dolls that stood for herself, her sister and mother and ran them to the father doll. They fell on him and cried until their mother said they must leave, must run away. They fled, abandoning everything, and travelled first by boat and then in the back of a truck until they came to La Chinita in the north-west of Colombia, ironically an area that has seen some of the biggest massacres in the civil war that has raged in the country for more than 40 years.
There was little anyone could do to help once Juanita's story had been told. One day she
vanished from La Chinita with her family. They have melted into the shadowy hordes of the disappeared, who haunt this troubled land like living ghosts. They are almost certainly dead by now, just a few more statistics in a nation whose conflict has ravaged millions of lives. One of the most corrupt and dangerous countries in the world, Colombia is a land where the heavies - los machos - rule. Its people suffer heinous war crimes. Massacres like that of Juanita's father happen frequently, with whole families being tortured and slain.
Juanita's story is just one of many related by Sara Cameron, a New York-based writer, who, along with her husband, George McBean, works for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in the States where he is head of design. He creates graphics and literature that help save the lives of millions of children through raising awareness about such low-cost health measures as immunisation or the provision of clean drinking. McBean has even involved Disney's Hollywood studios in making cartoons for the fund, tackling the issue of worldwide poverty. Meanwhile, Cameron travels widely, writing about the plight of women and their families, whether they are street children in Bogota or the victims of war, such as those in Colombia.
The Scottish couple and their three children live in a beautiful house in upstate New York, but still call Edinburgh their home and maintain a flat in the city, despite the fact McBean, a fit, silver-haired, fifty-something marathon runner, has been with the fund for almost 25 years and has lived and travelled all over the world with his wife and family. Sadly, says Cameron, a slender, fine-boned woman in her late forties, they don't see enough of their Edinburgh flat but, "It's where the heart is, though," she says.
Since 1998, Cameron has spent an increasing amount of time in Colombia, where, she says about 5,000, mostly civilians, are killed every year in the war. More than two million people - one in 20 Colombians - have been forced to abandon their homes since 1985 because of the coruscating conflict. Disappearances and kidnappings in the country are widespread.
"As deadly as the war is, even more innocent people fall victim to the general violence of the society," says Cameron when we meet at UNICEF's New York headquarters. "Colombian cities have some of the worst murder rates in the world, due to the lack of justice and huge chasms between rich and poor." Less than 20 per cent of the population controls more than 80 per cent of the wealth.
It will require nothing short of another revolution, albeit a peaceful one, to change the situation. As the world's leading producer of cocaine, Colombia is responsible for more than 80 per cent of the drug on the world market, and an increasing share of the US heroin market. The vast sums of money earned by traffickers have spawned corruption at every level of society, and those who confront it can expect threats from many sources. Some are anonymous, but most come from organisations set up as fronts for the traffickers or those in their pay, be they politicians, businessmen, members of the armed forces, rightwing paramilitary groups or leftwing guerrillas.
During the 1990s, the war expanded rapidly, fuelled largely by illegal drug money. As displaced families poured into towns and cities, kidnapping rates soared. Meanwhile, the government and armed groups failed in their efforts to launch peace talks. Eventually, Colombians tried to take peacemaking into their own hands. By the mid-nineties, a peace network, Redepaz, had brought hundreds of disparate groups together. The Conciliation Commission, made up of civic and religious leaders, embarked on a series of talks. Yet the peace movement was divided until, in 1996, Colombia's children tackled the problem themselves. Many of them had lost parents, siblings, or school friends and all sense of security, but they refused to become part of the violence themselves.
They have now established the inspirational Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia, involving hundreds of thousands of youngsters. It was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 - and has been every year since. Sara Cameron wrote the report that went to the committee. Yes, she says, they were disappointed not to win, but the children involved told her, "Any prize is nice, but the real prize is peace."
The author of an award-winning eco-thriller Natural Enemies, researched during the two years she worked with elephant conservationist Iain Douglas-Hamilton in Kenya, Cameron spent weeks interviewing Colombian children. They described in graphic detail what it was like fighting to survive in this living hell. She met children like Juan Elias, a highly intelligent teenager whose father was gunned down in his dental surgery. Now 18, Juan immediately went out and got a gun. "I was angry," he told Cameron. "I thought, 'If they try to kill me at least I will take some of them with me."' Today, he believes peace is the best revenge.
Wilfrido, now 17, has been subjected to death threats because of his work with the movement. Two years ago, on Good Friday, there was a gun battle in his town. Two of his friends were killed in the crossfire - one was 14, the other 17. "Every day innocent young people like them are getting caught and killed in the war," he says. "I used to think that in order to survive you had to have a weapon in your hands. Now I know what we really need are positive ideas. I learned that the abuse of the rights of children lies behind all their tragedies.
"I came to see my own journey through childhood as a struggle against the abuse of my own rights - including the right not to be recruited as a child soldier, the right to be protected from violence, and the right not to work underage. Making peace isn't just about talking, it's about taking action."
Mayerly was 12 when she saw her best friend and neighbour, 15-year-old Milton, stabbed to death by a gang in 1996. She still goes to his tomb two or three times a month to leave fresh flowers. "The war is everywhere," Mayerly says. "If peace is to last we need it everywhere."
After meeting these youngsters, and about 150 others, Cameron returned to New York to write her report, Making Peace With Children. "I spent that summer weeping into my laptop," she says, recalling the children's stories. "Yes, it was harrowing and I often wept because of their tragic stories and the amazing bravery of the young people, but mainly because I felt a huge obligation to them. When they told me their stories it was as if they had placed something precious in my hands. I didn't feel that writing the report would be enough. I believed the ideas behind the movement were important not just for Colombia, but for children everywhere who have had to live with violence."
She kept asking herself, "Who can I to tell this story to I'm sitting comfortably in New York, and I don't even speak Spanish properly." (She is much more fluent now.) Slowly, though, she realised only she could tell the story in the English language. Once the report was completed, she continued campaigning on behalf of the children's movement. She lobbied "anyone who would listen".
Her efforts paid off. The film producer Kathy Eldon made a CNN documentary, Soldiers of Peace: A Children's Crusade, for which Cameron returned to Colombia in May, 1999 as consultant. The crew were so moved that they set up their own Children's Peace Fund, which helps Colombian children learn English and seek political asylum. With UNICEF support, Cameron went back in 2000 to research a book, Out of War: True Stories from the Front Lines of the Children's Movement for Peace in Colombia, recently published in the States. A number of Hollywood film companies have considered making a movie based on the story.
An extraordinary testament to the human spirit, Out of War focuses on nine children, whose stories are told in cool, unemotional language. It was originally scheduled for a high-profile, celebrity launch on September 21 in New York, but was cancelled after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre. Only Juan Elias was in the city - he and his family have been so persecuted that they have had to flee for their lives.
"We had various speaking engagements lined up at schools and universities," says Cameron. "I thought these would also be cancelled, but they all called back and wanted us to come. Six days after the tragedy, Juan Elias and I were in a classroom discussing war, peace and revenge. Before September 11, Juan Elias, whose father was assassinated, would have seemed like an exotic creature. After September 11, he belonged." One student asked him, "How could you forgive your father's assassins?" and he replied, "I don't know; I just know there is no other way to live." Another asked, "What should America do?" and he said, "You must learn how to forgive."
This made Cameron catch her breath. "How could anyone in that room be ready to contemplate forgiveness so soon? But the students launched into a debate on it, a reminder for me how young people see things so differently from adults."
Reaction to the book, Constructores de Paz in Spanish, or Builders of Peace, in Colombia was fantastic, says Cameron. It was launched there on October 25, the fifth anniversary of the Children's Mandate for Peace and Rights. Some people were disturbed that "a foreigner" had told such stories, about their own people, their own children, says Cameron, "Yet they seemed to think no Colombian would write such a book. Many people thanked me for writing it. I guess others weren't convinced.
"Nevertheless, something wonderful happened during that trip. I believed those young people told me their stories because they really thought that in doing so they could help make peace. Their stories were like a burden I carried. I didn't feel I deserved them and for a long time and I tried to shed the responsibility. I wanted to give their stories away, but couldn't let go of them until they'd found a proper home. The most marvellous thing was the realisation that finally the stories had found that home, in a book that Colombian children could read," she says.
The French edition of Out of War is published this month. Meanwhile, life remains a struggle for many of the children with whom she stays in touch. But occasionally some stories have a happy ending. "The best news," says Cameron, "is that 15-year-old Alberto's policeman brother was freed by the armed group that had held him captive for months."
Next month she is off to India for UNICEF, then possibly Nepal and Pakistan, travelling with teams at the forefront of the struggle to eradicate polio. "The way I work has been changed forever by my experience in Colombia," she says. "I'm much more attuned to telling life stories as a way of understanding the struggles of people living in very difficult conditions. Instinctively, when I see people in tough situations my questions are not about how bad things are, but about what enables them to survive. The Colombian kids taught me that."
She believes she should now examine her own children's lives more (she has two sons and daughter, aged between 13 and 21). "There was a point when I realised I was getting into the lives of the kids in Colombia in a way I wasn't exploring my own children's lives. I have to work out how to find time to do that."
Her daughter, Ainslie, was 17 when she went to Colombia in 2000. "She spent three weeks with me while I talked to kids. As we prepared to fly home, she turned to me and said, 'I feel like I've been sleeping and I just woke up.' I honestly couldn't have hoped for a better, more profound reaction from my own child."
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