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"Once you have seen the children, it's not possible to turn your back on them," says Tonderai Chikuhwa '96, pictured at the Macalester International Roundtable last October.
GREG HELGESON
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by Kermit Pattison
The child was only 3 and his hands had been hacked off as an act of terror by the rebel forces of Sierra Leone. Yet Tonderai Chikuhwa '96 remembers another wound besides the severed limbs: the boy's eyes, staring vacantly into nothingness.
It was just one of many harrowing sights he has witnessed in his work with the United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict. He has traveled the world grappling with the worst outrages of war: children mutilated, raped, killed or turned into soldiers.
"It's probably the most important issue on the planet," says Chikuhwa. "These kids who are being traumatized in situations of armed conflict are the custodians of our future. This is an issue that should be personal to everybody."
His work puts him at the forefront of a burgeoning international movement. The U.N. now publishes a "list of shame" that identifies perpetrators of abuses against children and has passed six resolutions on children and armed conflict in as many years. In Côte d'Ivoire, such pressure forced rebel forces to stop using child soldiers.
Yet there remains a gulf between these international norms and the situation on the ground in places like Darfur, where families in displaced persons camps must decide whether to send their sons and daughters out to collect firewood at the risk of being raped, conscripted or murdered. "A 13-year-old girl told me, 'It's better for me to be raped than for my brother to be killed,'" says Chikuhwa. "These are absolutely unacceptable choices."
Chikuhwa's background and education uniquely prepared him for this mission. He was born in the former Soviet Union in 1972 to a Zimbabwean father and a Ukrainian mother and spent the first eight years of his life in Sweden.
He attended high school in Swaziland and was looking at universities in the U.S. and Europe when fate intervened. "I was using this thick and unwieldy catalog called Peterson's Guide and I happened to turn the page and there was Macalester. It looked very good and I recognized the name. This must mean something in the big scheme of things."
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A rebel child soldier chases a looter in a rebel-held area of Monrovia, Liberia, in August 2003.
AP PHOTO/SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM
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Financial aid made this dream possible. "I was very happy and challenged." He laughs about one particular challenge--his senior thesis under Professor Ahmed Samatar. "In terms of sheer heavy lifting and trauma, my experience in international studies ranks up there. I say that with a smile, but it was a very tough experience, and one that I've drawn from ever since."
Samatar invited his former student to be a guest speaker at last fall's Macalester International Roundtable on the future of the U.N. "He tries to engage the big questions. Dealing with the place of children in war-torn societies is a particularly big question, isn't it?" asks Samatar.
Chikuhwa, who majored in international studies and political science, chose the University of Cape Town for a master's program because he wanted to work on African issues in Africa. Then fate called once again. He was watching a soccer game in a pub when his cellphone rang. Olara Otunnu, the Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, was looking for an assistant and had heard about Chikuhwa from a mutual friend. "I stood in the pouring rain on a cold day in Cape Town and had a conversation for an hour and a half," recalls Chikuhwa. "Two weeks later I was in New York."
| A 13-year-old girl told me, "It's better for me to be raped than for my brother to be killed." These are absolutely unacceptable choices. |
The U.N. has embarked on a determined campaign to protect children from war. The Office of the Special Representative identifies perpetrators of abuses against children and recommends sanctions against them such as arms embargoes, restrictions on the flow of financial assets, travel restrictions and exclusion from post-conflict amnesty and government. The office also helps to raise awareness and resources for program interventions for the war-affected children themselves.
"From a human standpoint, it's simply the most compelling and irresistible issue," says Chikuhwa, who has a 2-year-old daughter, Thandi-Ines. "I felt there was nothing more important that I could hope to work on. I still feel that way, and that is the one thing that keeps me going."
Later, his work took him into the field. From 2002 to 2004 he worked in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Liberia and personally negotiated the release of 118 child soldiers. He began going into the bush with convoys of U.N. armored vehicles but found the military escorts made the child soldiers and their commanders wary.
Going into the bush with a smaller team composed mainly of local NGO workers, he found, was less secure but more effective for persuading children to lay down their AK47 rifles. "Each one was personal," he says. "At the end of the day nothing counts as much as your rapport with the individual. It's a hustle. It's messy, and it's by any and all means to convince these kids to put down their guns and come with you. Usually they are afraid because they have done bad things and they think that you are going to take them to a U.N. prison."
Disarming the children was only the beginning. Many were addicted to a potent mixture of cocaine and gunpowder; some had committed atrocities themselves, which sometimes made it more difficult for families and communities to accept their children back and made it harder for the children themselves to overcome feelings of guilt and depression.
Chikuhwa later returned to New York. He now serves as a program officer with responsibility for children and armed conflict advocacy programs, mainly in Africa and Latin America, and negotiates with member states of the U.N. Security Council for measures to protect children in war.
"There are few things more frustrating than working on a human issue in a political house," Chikuhwa says. "To see lack of political will and to see the faces and consequences for the children is spiritually demoralizing. But one of the things that has driven me is that once you have seen the children, it's not possible to turn your back on them. And sometimes we can actually do something to make their lives better." Kermit Pattison is a St. Paul writer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ and Inc.
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