A CHILD SOLDIER SEES HIS MOTHER AFTER 6 YEARS. BUT WHY DOESN’T HE SPEAK?
BENTIU, South Sudan —
The teenage boy walked off the plane with two small rocks jammed into his ears.
His head still hurt from the beatings, and loud noises bothered him, but he
didn’t want any earplugs, just those two little rocks.
He had no bags. His
pants were dirty. He was the size of a man but with the confusion of a child in
his eyes. He had been drafted into a militia, captured by government soldiers,
punched, kicked, whipped and stomped.
And now, after six long
years, he was going home.
Stepping into a Unicef
truck and sliding across the long benchlike seats in the back, he looked
terrified.
“Duop, can you hear
me?” a Unicef worker asked, using the boy’s first name. “You’re going to see
your mom.”
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Duop stared out the
window, and as the truck rumbled along a hard, jutted road, nobody else said a
word.
South Sudan, the world’s youngest
country, hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to, especially for its
children. This nation was birthed in a halo of
jubilation in 2011 but soon cracked open into brutal, ethnically driven
warfare that has burned down schools, ripped apart families, put thousands of
children under arms and disfigured, maimed and killed countless others.
Now the country is
being stalked by famine, and famines tend to pick off the youngest. During
Somalia’s famine in 2011, more
than half of the quarter-million people who died were children under 5.
As Herodotus wrote
more than two millenniums ago: In peaceful times, children inter their parents.
In war times, parents inter their children.
For South Sudan, it
doesn’t look as if the war times are going to end anytime soon. And even if
they do, there will be permanent damage.
Duop is around 16. He
has big hands, thin wrists, a shaved head and an oval face with a rounded chin.
He is from the Nuer ethnic group and a village in the country’s north, near the
town of Bentiu, where the savanna is relatively flat and the thorn bushes and
scratchy elephant grass stretch to the horizon.
The heat here has an
almost physical presence. By 9 a.m., it’s triple digits. By noon, 110. The
sunlight is blinding and unsparing, heavy and bewildering. During the hot hours
of the day people hide under trees.
Duop was a child
soldier, among
the 10,000-plus toting rifles in South Sudan. Unicef officials say both the
rebels and the government military, which has been trained by the United
States, use child soldiers, some as young as 10, and under international law
using children that young is a war crime.
One reason Duop’s last
name is not being included in this article is because Unicef officials said he
witnessed many war crimes. The soldiers he saw committing these atrocities
could easily hunt him down.
The full extent of what
Duop experienced — and suffered — is a bit of a mystery. His family said that
government soldiers punched him in the head repeatedly and kicked him in the
face. He seems to have lost much of his hearing and the ability to talk. He may
also be hearing voices, said some of the aid workers struggling to bring him
out of his shell.
Photo
Duop soon after being reunited with his family. Credit Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
This could be another
reason for the rocks in Duop’s ears. He may be trying to keep the voices out.
Sometimes, when he’s
sitting alone, he suddenly laughs. Or scowls.
From numerous accounts
pieced together from family members, it seems that Duop quit school around the
age of 9, left home, joined a rebel militia, then joined the government army,
defected, became a rebel again, was captured, beaten and tortured by government
soldiers and then discarded. All this by his 17th birthday, though no one knows
precisely when that will be.
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Unicef’s office in
South Sudan has a database of thousands of children separated from their
parents, and in Duop’s case, he got lucky, considering all that he had been
through. In December, an older man found him badly wounded and wandering around
an army base outside Juba, South Sudan’s capital. The older man bundled him up
and took him to a large displaced persons camp, where Unicef began trying to
figure out who he was.
“He did not speak for
weeks,” said James Elder, a Unicef spokesman. “I remember after several days he
would acknowledge a smile, or, at the sight of a gun, a grimace.”
Duop’s mother hadn’t
seen him in six years. Through repeated visits to her village, Unicef tracked
her down and brought her to a displaced persons camp in Bentiu, the only safe
place for them to reunite.
When Duop stepped out
of the truck, tears burst out of his mother’s eyes. But Nuer culture said she
couldn’t touch him, not until he was cleansed. So it was time to make a
sacrifice. An aunt scampered away, disappearing into the bowels of the camp,
saying something about a goat.
The Bentiu camp, like
all such camps, is highly concentrated misery. Picture a one-story city of
120,000 souls, row after row after row of dust-blown shacks arranged in a grid
of long gravel roads and right angles, something irredeemably hopeless in the
perfect geometry that seems to go on for miles and miles.
“I feel trapped,” said
Gatkuoth Wuor, a teacher living here.
No, he shook his head
and corrected himself.
“I am
trapped.”
People stay here for
two reasons. They are afraid of getting killed accidentally in a crossfire
between the government and the rebels, who constantly skirmish right outside
Bentiu. Or they are afraid of getting killed intentionally by government
forces. Just about everyone in Bentiu’s camp is Nuer, and South Sudan’s
government, especially the military, is dominated by members of the Dinka
tribe.
It was a Nuer-Dinka
power struggle that started the war in 2013, two years after South Sudan became
independent from Sudan, and a good part of Bentiu was burned down. Recently,
the fighting has sucked in many other ethnic groups, engulfing new areas of the
country and calling into question South
Sudan’s very integrity.
A small white goat was
eventually procured. Its throat was slit, blood splashing on the ground. Duop’s
relatives tried to seem purely joyous. Some sang and some danced.
But others whispered to
each other: How much do you think he really understands? Would he ever be able
to work? Are there any doctors who can help him?
(The camp has a small
hospital. But Unicef officials said there was nowhere in South Sudan that had
the specialists Duop needed.)
Duop retreated to a cot
in his aunt’s shack. He sat in the dusty gloom. One by one, his relatives
appeared in front of him. Several said that after he had left home years ago,
they thought he would never return.
They rubbed the muscles
in his arms, they felt his ears, they stared into his face. A group of women
stood a few feet away and ululated, and there couldn’t have been a greater
contrast between the animated, passionate voices and the flat, lost look in
Duop’s eyes.
In a way, the relatives
said, it was as if he had come back from the dead.
“But he’s not the
same,” his aunt said. “He’s deformed.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/world/africa/child-soldier-south-sudan.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0
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