CHILDREN OF CONFLICT: The other side of the story

 

Toss a coin into the air; it flips and turns in the air before it finally rests on the ground with its head or tail, deciding the fate of a game or a bet. Each coin has two faces, one completely contradictory to the other. Just a flip of a coin and there is a whole new story behind. Ever so often, there is a shootout, an encounter; where one or more ‘cadre’ of one of the factions, Naga National Workers, is shot at and killed.

A brief paper war ensues thereafter, mostly for disrupting peace. Couple of days and the matter is wrapped up and boxed away. But, strip them off their factions, uniforms and guns, beyond them lies families; wife and children.

In all conflict, women and children are the ones who are affected the most. If history is any indication, for that matter the present, children have always been the innocent bystanders caught up in the crossfire of violence and warfare.

“It’s not always that the father has been killed. In most cases, the parents are still alive but they bring in their children saying that they are better off here,” says a caretaker of an orphanage, the name of which is withheld.

According to UNICEF, during the last decade, it is estimated that child victims of warfare have included - 12 million left homeless, more than one million orphaned or separated from parents and some 10 million psychologically traumatized.

In some cases, even before children are aware of their being, they are ripped away from everything, familiar or close to them. “At times babies as young as 24 hrs are brought in because the mother dies during childbirth and the father has little choice but to give up his child,” adds the caretaker.

“Children have, of course, always been caught up in warfare. They usually have little choice but to experience, at minimum, the same horrors as their parents. Children have always been particularly exposed and the trauma of exposure to violence and brutal death has emotionally affected generations of young people for the rest of their lives,” states UNICEF.

“My father was a Naga National Worker and he was hardly around as I was growing up. My mother passed away when I was very young and he was all that I had. Every day I used to fear for his life and prayed for God to protect him. And whenever I missed him, I used to go into the jungle to stay with him,” says the son of a National Worker.

The Naga Nationalist Movement is one of the longest in modern history and one can only imagine the many young lives that have and are being affected in the fight that continues till today.

Sadly, society has the tendency to undermine or overlook the effect of conflict in children, because they are minors. In any case, it is always the weak and the vulnerable who suffer the most in silence, because they do not get a say in the very thing that is destroying their lives. This is but just a flip of a coin. Toss it in the air and facets of countless stories with innocent lives intertwined into the violence will flash across before it finally rest s on its head or tail.