After War, Child Soldiers Fight a New Battle
By BRANDON KOHRT
May 09, 2008



Fighting for the Maoist guerillas should have been the hard part - but for Asha, the real fight began when she came home. As a 14-year-old in rural Nepal, facing an educational dead end and a forced child marriage, Asha (a pseudonym) joined the Maoist People’s Liberation Army, a communist rebel group battling to overthrow the king of Nepal and establish a republic. For two years, she fought alongside other teen recruits battling against the Royal Nepal Army.

Although Asha was in constant danger, the Maoists offered her a sense of empowerment, a way out of domestic slavery, and an opportunity to learn from women leaders. For Asha, even gun battles were better than what she faced back home. Given the choice, she would have never returned to her village.

In 2006, the decision was made for her. The Nepali government signed a peace accord with the Maoists, ending a decade of bloody fighting and sending more than 6,000 child soldiers home to families and communities unprepared and often unwilling to accept them.

Asha’s return brought shame on her family members, who quickly married off their runaway daughter to a 22-year-old man in a distant village."My parents thought it would be better if I married rather than continue with the Maoists," she said. "I wanted to go back with the Maoists." The small, slight, former soldier no longer had a gun to defend herself against her husband’s repeated rapes and his family’s beatings. After a year of abuse, she tried to hang herself.

Sadly, Asha’s situation is not uncommon. Over the past year in Nepal, doing my MD-PhD research for Emory’s anthropology department, I have met many child soldiers like her.

I started doing anthropology and mental health research in Nepal in 1996, the year the Maoist People’s War began. Traveling between Atlanta and Kathmandu, watching Nepali friends and research participants endure the horrors of war, I felt despondent and powerless. I told myself that at least life would get better for them when the war ended. I assumed people disabled by depression and psychological trauma would begin slowly to heal when the guerillas put down their guns. After holding on to that hope for over a decade, I returned to Nepal in 2006 unprepared for what the child soldiers I interviewed were telling me: that peace alone was not going to heal everyone.

Working with Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO), a nonprofit Nepali organization, I coordinated a study of 380 child soldiers across Nepal for UNICEF. I traveled to the villages of dozens of former child soldiers. In most cases, I found, it is not just the child who needs help - it is everyone around them.

With TPO and UNICEF, I helped develop a training course for women and men in the communities with former child soldiers. We trained them not only to assist child soldiers with emotional distress, but to work with teachers, families, and religious leaders, to stop forced child marriage, to promote education for girls, and to reduce the social stigma against the returned children. Schools were the best place for starting these changes. Teachers had been making the child soldiers sit on the floor. They mocked the children, "Hey little Maoist! Where is your army now?"

The local staff we trained worked with these teachers, often uncovering the teachers’ hidden fears of the child soldiers. Through development of coping strategies and increased insight into their own actions and discrimination, teachers felt more secure and began to support the returned children. Soon the students and other villagers began to follow the teachers’ positive examples.

Six months after her suicide attempt, Asha, now 17, is benefiting from one such offshoot of TPO work. Originally, she said, she joined the Maoist army because they promised her an education, a job, and a life of her own choosing. Now, with the help of a UNICEF-funded program, she’s beginning to realize these goals.

"There are people helping me now," she said sitting in her family’s hut. "They are getting me sewing lessons so that I can earn money." I find hope in Asha’s story. But, support for Nepal’s child soldiers is continuously on the verge of collapse. Donors who fund programs for child soldiers favor emergency interventions rarely lasting more than six months. But, in a country with few health resources and endemic poverty, programs require years of support.

I realized that drawing international attention to the issue could be a step towards more support for child soldiers. Since October, I have been collaborating with documentary filmmaker Robert Koenig to help Asha and others tell their stories. We hope to complete the film, Returned: Child Soldiers of Nepal’s Maoist Army, later this year.

In my studies on the psychological effects of war, I have long focused on violence and trauma as roots of mental health problems. Talking with Asha and other child soldiers changed that. Now I see the importance of daily discrimination, poverty, lack of education, and domestic violence that can erode a person’s psychological being.

The flipside of that is the ability of strong community support to build healthy hearts and minds, even in the face of terrible trauma. Now back in Atlanta, I wonder about the effect of community-based mental health approaches here in the United States. If communities can heal through the ravages of a decade of widespread violence in Nepal, how could it transform lives here?

I hope community support will continue to increase for Asha and other child soldiers. And, ideally, mental health programs, whether in Kathmandu or Atlanta, will increasingly focus on communities because, ultimately, healing is something that we do together.


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New Film Captures Children's Struggles
By MIHIR DES

Dec. 07, 2007


When Brandon Kohrt and Robert Koenig visited Ramechhan, a village in rural Nepal, they stopped at a police station to register their identities, as required by law. But they were greeted not by police but by a group of child soldiers.

The children were policing the area because the police station was closed. So instead of receiving a friendly welcome, they were robbed of their money. Kohrt, an Emory graduate student, and Koenig, a filmmaker, had traveled to Nepal to film a documentary about child soldiers like the ones who greeted them in Ramechhan.

Kohrt, a student in an M.D.-Ph.D. program between the anthropology department and the School of Medicine, has been working in Nepal for the past 11 years, doing field research for his dissertation about mental health problems such as depression and substance abuse.

Earlier this year, when Kohrt went to Nepal to finish his dissertation, he witnessed children associated with the Maoist insurgency — a group that fought the Nepali government from 1996 to 2006 — being reintegrated into their communities.

He told his long-time friend Koenig, an Emmy Award-nominated producer, writer, editor, and director of photography, about his research. They decided that the stories of the children were worthwhile material for another documentary.

Kohrt, Koenig and a film crew departed for Nepal in late September and spent the next several weeks interviewing former child soldiers. They were accompanied by another Emory alumnus, Scott Ippolito, who served as the cinematographer.

Nepal's society operates under a caste system, with people of low castes forced to live in poverty, denied access to jobs and other opportunities. Also limiting opportunities, education beyond the fifth grade costs money. Many families cannot afford to educate their children.

Many children who fight for the Maoists were forced because which the Maoists demanded contributions from households in rural areas. Households with no money or food had to give the Maoists a “physical person,” in most cases a child.

Other children, Koenig said, joined voluntarily because they had no other opportunities. Kohrt said girls are the majority of the children who joined voluntarily because they essentially become servants at home once they are pulled out of school.

It's a choice that "illustrates their desperation," Kohrt said. "These children see their only opportunity for a future as joining the Maoists," he said.

One boy Koenig interviewed became quiet and introverted after seeing his friend killed.

"Once that happens,” Koenig said, “that is the end of your childhood. There is no coming back from there."

According to Kohrt and Koenig, however, the worst part of being a child soldier is the reintegration.

Koenig gave one example of a low-caste girl he interviewed for the documentary. When she returned from her service, she was 14, and her family immediately married her off to a 22-year-old. Her in-laws did not accept her because they believed she was impure after being around so many men in her time with the insurgents.

Overwhelmed by the disapproval, the girl attempted to hang herself. She survived but was banished to her parents' house.

Now that she's been divorced, she cannot get remarried because of the culture, and she cannot get a practical education because she does not have the money. Koenig says the only opportunity for many girls is "commercialized sex in which they make next to nothing."

The film is currently being edited and prepared for release.

Among the issues the crew faced were security threats. Koenig kept a blog through much of the trip but stopped updating it in mid-November because he feared reprisal from the Young Communists League, an organization of child soldiers.

There were also technical challenges. Koenig wrote on his blog that many of the villages they visited had no electricity, running water, bathrooms or even outhouses.

The filmmakers believe that with enough support, they can find ways to give child soldiers more opportunities through education.

"We cannot think about these children as vulnerable and victimized because they are not,” Kohrt said. “They are empowered, have agency, and often choose voluntarily to become a part of this situation. So we need to think about how these children would use opportunities beyond the military if they were given a chance."

(Article also available from here.)



White Mills Man Brings Plight Of Nepalese Youngsters To Life
By TESSA LYNADY



Sep. 25, 2007

HONESDALE- While most American teens spend their days worrying about prom dates and driver's licenses, many teens in Nepal are faced with a much different and much more terrifying reality. At any given moment, they could be abducted and forced into a deadly combat, one that they may not even understand or believe in. These children are the casualties of a government and a country gone wrong.

Their stories are ones that are not traditionally heard of in American media. Many people are unaware of their plight, and the terror that they are faced with every day. Robert Koenig and his colleagues at Adventure Production Pictures are hoping to change that with their documentary, Returned: Children Soldiers of Nepal's Maoist Army.

Mr. Koenig graduated from Wallenpaupack Area High School in 1993 and is a former resident of White Mills. He is the president of Adventure Production Pictures, whose mission, according to their website, is to "highlight subjects and stories that have not been told or do not have much of a voice on the global stage."

According to Mr. Koenig, the main focus of this documentary is to "meet with three or four of the kids who were recruited by the Maoist Insurgency and who have been released, to document their progress and to document the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that are helping them."

Mr. Koenig, along with fellow Adventure Production Pictures staff members Scott Ippolita, Director of Photography, and Brandon Kohrt, Director of Research, will be arriving in Kathmadu in October, where they will spend the months of October and November shooting the documentary. Post production will take place from December until March, with the documentary set to be completed by April 2008.

As stated on the documentary's website, "the goal is to see the contrast between a traditional Hindu society ruled by a corrupt monarch and an insurgent group that claims to represent the people and bring about change, no matter the cost."

The documentary will present all sides of the issue by giving coverage to the victims and their families, members of the community, and members of the Communist Party of Nepal (the Maoists).

For the victimized children, one could only imagine that the road to recovery will be long and arduous. These children not only face the physical consequences of combat injuries, but they also must overcome the misery of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The documentary's website relates a few stories of child warriors and their experiences as forced fighters. The Maoists do not discriminate against sexes, abducting both girls and boys. "Duma" was abducted when she was 14 and was permanently injured during a shoot-out. Another young girl, "Kanti" was forced to fight when she was 13. She was beaten, worked to the point of exhaustion, sleep deprived, and forced to perform, under threats of death, for the Maoist.

In many instances, these children are brainwashed by their captors, told that the Maoists were trying to liberate the oppressed, discriminated peoples of Nepal. Some children developed affectionate feelings towards their abductors. A boy named Suraj Damai saw the commander as a father figure, stating "I loved him."

The warring taking place in Nepal is the result of a constitutional monarchy that is on the verge of a collapse, and the successes of the Maoist Insurgency, or "People's War", that began in February of 1996. Human rights organizations have estimated that 30% of the Maoist militia is composed of children under the age of 18.

These children, and many others like them throughout the world who are forced into combat, are facing some dire circumstances. It could only be hoped that by bringing some much needed attention to their crisis, something will be able to be done. As Mr. Koenig explained "we are hoping to raise awareness of the issue of using kids in conflict all over the world. These are issues that we never hear about, so it's an important thing to shed a spotlight on."

For more information on the documentary Returned: Children Soldiers of Nepal's Maoist Army, visit http://nepaldocumentary.com. For additional information on Mr. Koenig's production company and their various projects, visit http://adventureproductionpictures.com/company.aspx.

Guest column by BRANDON KOHRT

All in the mind: looking beyond just the physical scars of conflict

From Issue #355 (29 June 07 - 05 July 07)

Badri Chapagain, the district health officer of Jumla, received a phone call as we finished dinner in his quarters last month. The hospital was summoning him to confirm the cause of death of a suspected suicide.

Next day, reports on Radio Karnali and bajar talk revealed that an ex-Maoist, Sagar, had hanged himself in the room where his wife was sleeping. Sagar’s suicide echoed the distress of the many mental patients we saw at a three-day health camp in Jumla organised by the district health office and World Vision at the request of CPN-M leaders to coincide with their Karnali exhibition. With the flag of the Maoist Republican People’s Health Movement fluttering above us, we examined cadres and locals suffering from anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and other psychiatric problems.

As in the rest of the country, Jumla lacks a basic mental health infrastructure. The approximately 30 psychiatrists in Nepal are all in major cities. Few health post workers have training in mental illness. Psychiatric medications are rare outside urban centres. Most psychiatric patients....

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