Foreword by Aldy Castor, M.D., President, HRDF aldyc@att.net
The following story is fictitious, but something like it may have already happened, or may soon happen. By our research, the presence of child soldiers among Haitian gangs has been on the radar for at least twenty years.
In April this year, Catherine Russell, head of UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, estimated to the UN Security Council that « anywhere from 30% to 50% of armed groups in Haiti currently have children within their ranks. » In May, the Associated Press reported that Bruno Maes, UNICEF’s head in Haiti, more specifically said, « Between 30% to 50% of members of armed groups are now children. »
And on June 29 during a meeting with the Prime Minister in Miami, U.S. Congresswoman Frederica Wilson stated, « We were surprised to find out that fifty to seventy percent of the gang members are little boys. » Thus, the estimates are rising, as is the urgency for adaptive rules of engagement.
References upon request. Your comments are welcomed. Thank you.
——— ——————————————– ————————————————————— ——————————————- —————
« LITTLE BOYS, BIG GUNS »
by Stuart M. Leiderman
I.
It was 2200 hours in Port-au-Prince, dark, muggy, and swarming with mosquitoes. A storm threatened to break. By contrast, the Kenyan Barracks on the far side of Haiti’s national airport were well-lit, air-conditioned, screened and tightly-roofed against the elements.
After the day’s grappling with danger in the city, peacekeepers’ debriefing was conducted at 1800 hours under a sprawling tent, followed by dinner from numerous gas grills, microwaves and rice pots, encircled by folding tables, aluminum chairs, and a line of portable toilets painted camouflage-style. Everything – the food, furniture, toilets – had come from two large cargo planes, now tethered in the distance. They would fly back to the States in the morning to be refilled with equipment and supplies.
The debriefings had become arduous over the past two weeks. Every late afternoon, the several hundred specially-recruited Kenyan police assembled and divided into groups of ten around tables, still armed and suited up. Their job was to answer questions from professional « listeners » about their encounters with people, places, and events each day. In addition to gathering information and signs of change, the debriefings were also meant to help them clear their heads and consciences for the next day’s mission. In this way, the routine of Kenyans in Haiti pretty much mirrored interventions in about a dozen other countries where internal conflicts have made civilian life intolerable and caused tens of millions of people to flee their homelands.
At first, all the soldiers around the tables had something to say to their listeners. Their descriptions of the capital’s situation were precise, with singular scenes – some memorable, some surprising, and others downright shocking. But as days passed, fewer soldiers spoke during debriefings. Most deferred to their squad leaders. Their comments became repetitive – « dirty, dusty, dangerous » – and with fewer recommendations to improve maneuvers. It was as if they noticed little change in the size, behavior and deployment of their enemy from one day to the next, or if they did, they took no field notes or body-cam footage, and then forgot the details by the time they returned to base. This was a training flaw, pure and simple.
The debriefers as well became accustomed and dulled to the apparent sameness and, after two weeks, were probing each peacekeeper less and less for differences in neighborhoods, engagements, risks, enemy strength and tactics. As a result, the Kenyans’ experiences which should have been accurately recalled and openly reported, piled up below the surface and became embedded in silence.
Until tonight. While not reported to their listeners at debriefing, or talked about at dinner, back in the relative privacy of their barracks, word spread that one of the squads believed they had encountered, engaged, and killed a boy sniper. If true, it was unexpected and very troubling. And because the squad in question, being under fire, was unable to approach, retrieve, and confirm the evidence of what it thought had occurred, it remained a troubling supposition.
That squad was comprised of five Kenyan policemen with peacekeeping experience in Africa. After dinner, they retreated to their barracks and huddled around a wooden table outside the building’s front door. They opened some soft drinks and by lamplight attempted a few rounds of dominoes. But their minds weren’t on the game. One of them broke the silence, « What did we really see this afternoon? Could it have been a boy, no older than my kid brother? » A second said, « At minimum, it was a small person, in rags, with a sniper rifle, almost invisible in the rubble and shadows. » A third added, « His shot caught us by surprise. It whizzed by and almost killed me. » A fourth said, « We were too exposed to do anything but return fire and throw grenades. » The fifth added, « If we hadn’t been swarmed, we could have looked and known for sure. » Back to the first one again, who said, « At home, they trained us to fight grown bandits, not child snipers. Not Angola all over again. »
II.
For an hour around the table, the five soldiers tried to remember everything from earlier in the day. Then, by agreement, they walked together to the barracks that served as mission leaders headquarters. It was still lit, despite the late hour. Inside, the walls were covered with maps and space-images of Haiti and the Caribbean. On some easels were flow charts that resembled football plays, and by the door there were two piles of clipboards. One pile held the day’s debriefing notes, group by group. The other pile held each squad’s assignments for the following day.
The five soldiers knocked, entered and saluted. The squad leader went over to the debriefing clipboards, shuffled through them, found theirs, and approached the commanding officer. « Sir, » he said, gesturing to the clipboard, « We’ve remembered more about what happened to us this afternoon. We may have killed a boy sniper. If so, we think it changes things, that is, what we were trained for. Specifically, it changes our assumption about who comprises or may comprise the enemy, and that in turn may complicate our rules of engagement. At minimum, it is troubling. » He continued, « Therefore, assuming the enemy abandoned that spot after we fought there, and it’s safe to return, we want to go back there tomorrow and look for evidence. Please approve our request…Sir. »
The squad’s revelation and request hung in the room while the commanding officer and his aides let it all sink in. Before arriving in Haiti, everyone had read that Haitian gangs heavily recruited, even captured and terrorized, children for rearguard tasks like cooking, washing, hauling water, bandaging wounds, maintaining motorcycles, even cleaning firearms and sorting and packing ammunition. But no one apprised them that some of these children were actually fighting among gangs and against peacekeepers across the capital and suburbs, and joining murderous assaults on families and workers in stores, offices, churches, schools and neighborhoods. It was indeed troubling and, if true, the mission leaders could expect that other squads would soon be reporting similar killings of children during combat.
The commander took the squad’s mission clipboard, scratched out the next day’s assignment and replaced it with « Return to previous sector and attempt to confirm killing of child sniper. » The soldiers saluted once more, then turned and left the building. It had started to rain, so hard that they were soaked before reaching their own barracks for a few hours’ sleep.
III.
The downpour with added wind continued through the night and into the next morning. It pounded on the roof of the squad’s personnel carrier as they slogged through the capital’s low-lying flooded streets and deeply-rutted alleys. It overpowered the windshield wipers and began seeping through the door seals.
With a dash-mounted GPS set to the previous day’s coordinates and aided by the recollection of a Haitian police officer who sat beside the driver, the men reached the sought-for location but did not recognize it. What was a residential crossroads twenty hours ago had been demolished by another squad to end the firefight and permit their own retreat.
So before them now was a massive jumble, a nondescript convergence of broken sidewalks and utility lines, twisted rows of wrought-iron fencing, up-ended curbstones, fake-hollow masonry columns, and mountains of scorched building fragments, broken lumber and pulverized windows. These had been apartment buildings of the poorest sort imaginable, generations behind the kinds of places where the Kenyans themselves had grown up back home.
The wreckage had caused a cul-de-sac. This meant that their narrow entry had no way forward. Supposing they could turn their big vehicle around in the narrowed space, the only way out was as they came in. The rainstorm coursed by them as high as the running-boards. It was more than ninety humid degrees F outside, and not much better inside.
Before leaving the vehicle, the men reviewed their previous day’s body-cam footage. The imagery indicated the sniper had fired from upstairs in a yellow-painted building. Looking now at the post-battle rubble around them, they only saw one big pile of tumbled and broken cinder blocks where most of them were burnt but some of them were perceptibly yellow. At the spot, two scraggly-wet alley dogs pawed the debris at the bottom of the pile. And above, several large silent ravens were perched on the rubble, only there and nowhere else.
As best they could see through the drenched windshield and side windows, the men made some new footage as they had been taught, first panning around the whole area and then focusing on their place of interest. Except for the dogs and carrion birds, it was a lifeless, inorganic scene. Like many other recently destroyed crossroads in and around the capital, this one too was already forgotten, of no strategic, cash or material value to either the gangs or the peacekeepers.
IV.
Being careful to leave the engine running, the five Kenyans and the Haitian police officer took a cautious look outside and exited the armored vehicle with an assortment of shovels, pry bars and cutters, as well as their customary weapons. Each began working in different spots at the bottom of the suspected debris pile. As they moved and lifted what they could, the dogs and birds watched them for opportunities.
Eventually, a soldier uncovered, stopped and stared at a small dark outstretched arm – motionless, bare and bloodied – framed in the debris pile by a fallen and splintered window-sash painted yellow. He called to the others in a somber voice. They came and knelt for a closer look, careful not to move anything that could become evidence until they had taken footage of what was there. The dogs slowly approached and began to whine. The ravens remained perched but flapped nervously.
It was definitely the hand and arm of a youth, and on the forearm was a crudely-inscribed tattoo, « JA1210. » The Haitian policeman exhaled, nodded to himself, but said nothing. One of the Kenyans went back to the personnel carrier for the computer tablet that held their mission training information. He returned and typed the letters and numbers. A screen appeared of known Haitian gang markings. Among them was « JA1210 » whose caption identified a gang of about two hundred that took its name from « January 12, 2010, » the date when a catastrophic earthquake fractured Port-au-Prince and vicinity, killing almost a quarter-million people.
It was the date of the worst natural disaster in modern times. On that day, the dead tattooed youth that the Kenyans just discovered had almost certainly not yet been born, while most of the adults in JA1210 were probably not yet in their teens. Conceivably, many if not most of them who survived were instantly orphaned and cast adrift by the gigantic unstable crack in the Earth’s crust that moved beneath Haiti’s capital…a crack that was still there and would someday move again.
The trainers back in Africa hadn’t conveyed any of this to the Kenyans during the months of preparation. Now suddenly, they were immersed in the legacy, risk and tragedy of « Haiti, » something that was completely foreign to them. And now it had become too late to prepare for it.
V.
The Kenyans thoroughly video-recorded the thepartially-excavated corpse. While they surmised it was the child sniper they had killed the day before, the body alone was not sufficient evidence. For that, they had to find more, while the heavy rain forced the polluted water higher around the debris piles. Working together, they soon uncovered the entire small broken body of a young boy, maybe twelve years old. His chest had bullet holes, probably from the Kenyan firing in self-defense, and his limbs were crushed, probably from when the building fell during the attack of the reinforcement squad. In the constant downpour, they recorded all of this, too.
Another minute’s work uncovered a sniper rifle with telescope sight. Next to it, under more rubble, were binoculars and a canvas shoulder bag of rifle bullets and a few soda crackers. No water, no fruit. As one of the soldiers pulled on the straps of the bag, another small dark hand and arm came out with it, then the frail body of a second young Haitian. Both wore only ragged shorts, no shirt, no shoes, no hat. The second boy’s pockets were full of rifle bullets, but no crackers. He did not seem to have been shot, so probably died with the first child when they were blasted from the upper floor of the yellow apartment building that then fell and crushed them.
In the rain and the sewage, with the dogs and the carrion birds looking on, the gruesome site of the two dead children shook the Haitian officer so badly that he had to back away, turn and gag for several seconds. The Kenyans themselves became uncertain about what to do next. The squad quickly realized that, after all, they had likely caused the children’s deaths. And because they had pretty much confirmed this in the presence of a Haitian police officer, there might be dire consequences. For them, this was unknown and unanticipated territory.
They recorded the second body; it likewise bore a « JA1210 » tattoo. Searching their clothes, the bag and surrounding rubble, they found no identifications. There were no wrist bands or neck chains to give clues of who they were, or from what families or neighborhoods. Referring again to their mission computer tablet, they learned that this particular gang ranged over the whole capital city and also along the central coast north and south of it.
VI.
Out of respect, and as they would have naturally done back home, the Kenyans decided to retrieve the bodies, the weapon, the bullets and the other items. They found room for everything in the back of the personnel carrier and, with difficulty, managed to turn the big armored vehicle around in the narrow space that had almost become full with rushing, stinking stormwater.
Halfway back to the barracks, the squad approached the Haitian officer’s police station. It was still raining hard. They pulled the vehicle up to the door, turned off the engine. All six of them sat silent for a few minutes. The dead boys’ corpses were in the back, wrapped in plastic tarps, along with the rifle and everything else.
The squad leader could see that the Haitian officer was still visibly shaken by their morning’s reconnaissance. In a quiet voice, he asked the officer, « You know, they are Haitians nonetheless. Will you take them? » The officer almost fainted. He hung his head, then slowly shook it sideways, answering, « No, how can I? We are not prepared for this. And if it became known that Kenyans caused such killing, even in combat, there could be a riot at the airport. They might even throw everyone out of the country. Then we would be back to where we were before you arrived, overwhelmed by gangs. » He continued, « I am really afraid. Please take them. I trust you. » With that, he turned and thanked the soldiers one by one, opened the vehicle’s door, went out into the rain and then through the door into the police station.
VII.
It was dusk when the squad returned to base. And it had become dark when, after debriefing and dinner, the soldiers pulled the personnel carrier behind their barracks and put the two dead boys, the rifle, bullets and everything into a deep grave, unmarked except in their minds. A few hours before, during debriefing, their body-cam footage confirmed to the « listeners » the existence of young boys among the gangs of Haiti, but in the routine sameness of daily reporting, their superiors never probed for details. No one asked about or wanted to see the actual bodies, and the five squad members never volunteered what became of them. And to their knowledge, no one ever returned to the demolished crossroads.
Inevitably, more Kenyan peacekeepers began to experience and report unintended deadly combat with armed Haitian children. The leaders of both countries and their multi-national sponsors soon agreed that such violent abuse of children was so repulsive and inhumane as to require immediate, surgical attacks on gangs holding, terrorizing and forcing children to fight. The powers also agreed that the peackeepers’ original training to « shoot on sight » any and all attackers was grossly inappropriate for the Haiti mission.
As a result, the Kenyans’ original rules of engagement were abandoned and replaced by a dual strategy where in addition to helping Haitian police find, disarm or kill adult fighters, hostage children by the thousands were sought, caught and swiftly relocated to safe zones for recovery and rehabilitation beyond the reach of gangs. For this, the Haitian government created and funded a « Ministry of the Next Generation. » It would not become Angola all over again.
Stuart M. Leiderman leiderman@mindspring.com