The lost generation of children abducted and forced into war

[emad]

The lost generation of children abducted and forced into war
From Catherine Philp in Kathmandu


ASHA had never met a Maoist rebel. She had only heard stories of them, how they fought the army in savage battles and whisked children away from remote villages. But the “People’s War” had never touched her sleepy village so she had little reason for fear or suspicion when three strangers approached her as she fetched the cattle home for the night.

“They told me to come over there because they had some questions,” the shy teenager said. “So I went. But when I got there they made me start walking with them away from my home. We walked and walked until we came to a place where there were about a hundred armed people in a clearing. It was then that I realised that they were Maoists.” Abducted by the guerrilla force to serve as a cook and nurse, Asha, then 13, had become one of the thousands of Nepalese youngsters caught up in Asia’s most brutal conflict, one that threatens to blight not only their childhood but the prospects of an entire generation.



Human rights organisations say that the civil war in Nepal is creating a lost generation of children, caught in the middle of an increasingly bitter power struggle between the Maoists and the security forces. “This conflict is a disaster for the children of Nepal,” Purna Sen, the Asia director of Amnesty International said in a report released last week.

Some are taken by the rebels to become revolutionaries; some are suspected of being Maoists and beaten and imprisoned by security forces; others are forced to flee their homes for fear of being caught up in the violence; others have their education cut short because of the conflict. And some, like Asha, suffer all these fates. Over the course of the past year she has been ripped away from her school and family and involuntarily conscripted into the rebel force and arrested and beaten by security forces.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1722808,00.html

[havocmom]

1. Not really that different from military recruiters in the US plying tricks

on kids behind parents' backs to serve in a way where PNACers have kidnapped US troops to fight for them in Iraq. The troops are forced into a combat situation and have to fight or die in a war started for corporate profit. Those troops have to rely on private corporations for foods and supplies. The tax payers have to pay the private contractors to keep sons, daughters, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers alive.

The US Military has also abducted, force into an illegal and pointless war and the taxpayers are paying ransom over and over to the corporate war profiteers who devised the whole thing.

While I lament what happens to the youths in other nations, I do not want Americans to think it is just a problem which happens in other lands. It is happening here, the methods are just a bit more polished and made seemingly legitimate by the takeover of the reins of power and governance.