How to finger your own death.

SOURCE:  Andrew O’Hagan London Review of books 
If you want to read the full text of this brave and brilliant article see:
 
 
With the Child Jihadis
 
Beltoon was told that the index finger of his right hand was the Shahadat, the finger of ‘witness’, the digit of Allah. He was told he must use this finger on the suicide vest to be sure of his place in paradise. He must be sure to flick the switch firmly with this finger.

At the juvenile detention centre in Kandahar there are two sets of children. The first are riotous and loud, arrested for theft and other crimes of that sort. When you give them a piece of paper and ask them to write down the reason they are in prison they simply scratch lines into the paper or scrunch it up. They can’t write. The second group are silent. But when they take the sheet of paper they begin to write the most beautiful script, their sentences full of fire and argument. These are the child jihadis
and their mothers tell them they will succeed next time. (Compare and contrast this to the Western mother who consoles her son for losing his tennis match and issues a similar encouragement)

The prison isn’t big on vocational training but they had some sewing machines before the man who operated them disappeared. Some of the boys are as young as ten and there is no education and too little water. But ‘the political boys’, as the guards call them, are keen to point out the legality of their activities from their point of view. The Afghan government, for reasons nobody understands, aims to move the children to a new site near Sarposa prison, a Taliban-rich area where adult inmates once sewed up their mouths in protest at what they believed was their unlawful detention. Evidence suggests that detained children are physically abused in these prisons. A boy who steals a pomegranate may steal another one and end up next to a kid who knows the quick way to another world.

One boy, Beltoon, came from the province of Paktia. The families in his village competed over whose sons would be sent to the madrassah. ‘You do not love your son, you do not teach him in the ways of Islam,’ the elders would say to parents who kept their sons at home. A counsellor I spoke to, Dr Shah Mohammad Abed, told me there has been a change in the villages: many elders now believe that the world has come to destroy Islam and they must fight back. Beltoon is 15: he was herding goats before his father decided he should go to the regional madrassah, where he spent nine months. The dean then asked for volunteers. Which of them wished to have ‘advanced’ education in Islam in Pakistan? Beltoon’s father and his uncles told him that this meant a better education.
‘Would he understand,’ I asked, ‘that going over the border would mean military training?’
‘The dean asks the child and his family if he wishes to be sacrificed in the way of Islam,’ Dr Abed replied. ‘This doesn’t mean giving him up to suicide bombing, but some will be. It can escalate from one madrassah to another and eventually the child might find himself in a place where the children are training to be suicide-bombers. The students in these madrassahs will be taken to the ultimate training centre in Pakistan blindfolded. They don’t know where they are going and when they arrive at this camp they have lost their bearings.’

Beltoon was driven to Quetta. (The border is open so he couldn’t even be sure he was in Pakistan.) At the compound he met older children who began to persuade him of the ‘cause’ – it’s a familiar process. There was a great deal of physical exercise, hard work carrying packs in the sun. Beltoon had no direct contact with his family; once or twice the dean of his madrassah would pass on some news. Beltoon wasn’t surprised to hear nothing: his family seemed to him to live without questions and without news. They didn’t have knowledge such as he was gleaning during the months in Pakistan. He had begun to trust the leaders around him. He wanted to please them, Dr Abed said.
Beltoon was told that the index finger of his right hand was the Shahadat, the finger of ‘witness’, the digit of Allah. He was told he must use this finger on the suicide vest to be sure of his place in paradise. He must be sure to flick the switch firmly with this finger. (A Unicef worker explained: ‘When the Kalima-e-Shahadat is said in Tashahhud during the prayer, all the fingers except the index should be lightly closed like a fist, keeping the thumb with the middle finger in a circle. It is sunnah – following what the Prophet did – to raise the index finger.’) In this way the mentors suggest that what they are doing is part of an Islamic ritual and Beltoon was convinced he had found the best way to raise himself to the pinnacle of respect and into a life much greater than this one.

Beltoon was close to a boy called Sahim, also 15. After six months in Quetta they were driven to a local house in Kandahar province for further ‘initiation’. They got to know the location where they would do their holy work. Sahim appeared to have no end of enthusiasm for the planned attack. He enjoyed speaking to Beltoon about the logistics. He couldn’t wait. Early in 2012 the boys were dropped off on a street near the American base. They were walking side by side and saying nothing when an Afghan soldier near the entrance to the base saw them. They seemed unsure what to do – Sahim pushed Beltoon and they argued for a moment – and the soldier ordered them to stop and he summoned other military. The boys’ suicide vests were removed on the spot and that night they were taken to the detention centre in Kandahar. Beltoon hasn’t seen his mother again but a message was sent to him encouraging him not to give up hope. ‘Maybe next time,’ she said.
Yet since the interim government was created in 2002, children have gained access to thousands of schools and today there are 8.3 million pupils, 40 per cent of them girls. (That’s a 650 per cent increase in ten years.) At the top of the stairs at Sherino High School there is a large portrait of an old girl who became a poet. The school has 121 teachers, all female. We looked in many of the classrooms – in one of them the girls were learning about magnets. A girl told me there was no ‘poisoning’ at the school. Later I stopped to ask her what she meant.
‘Some people in the community do not want girls to be educated,’ she said, ‘and in some schools they poisoned the drinking water and girls died.’
‘They died?’
‘We don’t have that here.’ It seems such incidents have been prevalent for some time, especially in the north, where hundreds of schoolgirls had been subject to attacks involving contaminated water and poison gas. At Sherino High School the students believe everything can change. Shabnam, who’s 17, was described by one of her teachers as the brightest girl in the whole school. She told me she gets up at dawn and comes in as early as possible every day. One of the reasons is the wonderful facilities they have, the classrooms, the computers, and most of all the sanitation. Shabnam’s father is a car dealer and she recently won a competition to write the best business plan. It was about how to buy oil in her home town of Mazar and sell it at a profit.

No comments:

Post a Comment

PLEASE send comments to

cheeverspeter@hotmail,com