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Culture and Conflict
No. 18, Summer 1995
Childrens' Political Violence
Political violence and childhood are apparently antinomic words. In fact, although a child, by naturc as violent as anybody else, reaches quite early a political ability, the practice of it, bound to a grown up status, is denied to him. Considerated as illegitimate by the international community which has even tried to legislate on it, young people's violence is still an easily mobilized resource for uncaring state or infrastate powers with political purposes whose definition remains unknown to recruited children. In some advanced conditions of social destabilization and political anarchy, children's political violence exceptionally takes on an autonomous character. However, this genuine subversion in the nature of things, risking to be taken in adult hands and to provoke children's ageing, is limited in time. Although young people's violence has no future, it leaves some deep impressions on general society, fills its imagination and encourages its changes.
The XXth century's historiography has shown little interest in children's history, and even less in their political violence. Until now, mentioning Gavroche was enough to explain it. Therefore, one has to wonder how the representation of a young boy savage killing, to which any juvenile violence still refers, has forced itself. Rediscovering how the archetype was elaborated, from a novel hero to a sentimental hero, shown among others in the last delivery of Pierre Larousse's Grand dictionnaire universel of the XXth century, is a necessary step which needs however to be confronted with " the density of reality ". In Lyon, during the Canuts' riots, in Paris in June 1932 on the street barricades, in February and June 1848, several statements report that children were present. However, it's only during the street barricades war, in May 1871, that a massive participation of the children is attested, first as street labourers, helping with the defense fortifications, and then as fighters. Still, if violence becomes sometimes an inevitable rite of passage, children's action remains subjected to the adults' logic.
The Paris Commune riots have a specific position in the history of the Parisian riots. There are the last Jacobin riots of the XXth century. Although they still occur on the street barricades, some rioters who are not meant to take part in the political and social game do participate in the Commune events : the children. The fact is well known. Indeed, since 1830, especially the Paris riots and revolutions have generated special protagonists : the workman in his overall, the shopkeeper, the street kid, the guard siding now with the rioters, now with the power, the army and the country people who come to the capital to crush the riot. It's necessary to be careful about the participation of the children in the Commune riots and more specifically about the teenagers. The poor records compared to the literary and journalistic dense statements tend to show that many questions will remain unanswered. None of those who have fought has left, until a proof of the contrary is produced, an account of the " adventure ". The statements, not always firsthand informations, are consequently adults'visions, men's and women's opinions concerning age groups about which they have an apparently jumbled idea : who is a child, who is a teenager at that time ?
It has been said that the urban scenery was disorganized and empty after the great change which has affected the flagging of the industrial society and of the working class. Today, in spite of the important lack of fieldword capable of showing the diversity of young violence's meanings, it would be difficult to carry on upholding such an opinion. The urban scenery is not empty. It is filled with an inextricable mixture of rebellion and ordinary delinquency allowing the most different interpretations. In the common showings, the idea of violence doesn't easily stand out in an always increasing delinquency, practised by very young people, teenagers hardly emerged from childhood. In the suburbs, in the so-called " delicate " areas, there is more and more a tendency to consider as violent some juvenile behaviours which were tolerated before and are now perceived as uncontrollable because some of the regulating mechanisms have disappeared. This violence shows a crisis in the relationaships between generations. It is more expressive than instrumental and is more a consequence of a politicizing difficult process of young people belonging to the working class, defined by the under-constitution of the sense of its protest in a changing society.
The Palestinian children socialize in an individual and collective traumatic life. Their games themselves are a symbolics of assimilation of a situation in which are mixed foreign assault and discredit of the close social environment. However, these children find the way to adapt themselves to an agressive and frustrating context through an elementary and violent political commitment. When applied to the " right " cause, an early practice of political violence can be, under certain circumstances, a good answer to the inflicted traumas and, at the end, can help peace to prevail.
Nowadays, one can observe the development of a juvenile violence which quite alters the image itself of childhood and adolescence. The image of the torturer child is substituted for or compared with the one of the absolute victimized child, whose inflicted violences provoke a general emotion. The first one, symbolized by the picture of the " Biafran " child, the famished victim of a genocide, has been spread out around the world during the civil war and regularly provokes compassion and solidarity, especially against the police force or criminals guilty of infanticide. However, it is partly spoilt by other pictures showing an armed child who is taking part in violences equally inadmissible. In Nigeria, the young ones are far from forming a coherent group at any level. In fact, they take part in different groups which show an identity of community. Those groups request all the citizens of the country and this demand leads the kids to fight and to mix with the crowd of citizens or with their specific communities. In most of the cases, the communities'mobilizations are issued from spontaneous crowd uprisings, linked with unpredictable reactions or situations. These generally attract children and teenagers who join the protagonists and take part in the fights. In other cases, the juvenile organizations themselves take the initiative in launching an attack, especially with the police force, bringing about some reactions of solidarity among the adults. Sometimes too, the agitators try to interpose the children between themselves and the police force. Many children take part too, in the street riots in a marginal but efficient way. Also, when in touch with some activist students, they actively take part in the street demonstrations provoked by some economical or political decisions which are considerated as unbearable. We find them in front during the hybrid and xenophobe pogroms which set the autochthons against the immigrants, at any level of the federal organization of the country, on the basis of regional, ethnic, confessional as well as historical and communal oppositions. The activist students'groups take an essential part in the uprisings. Also, the confessional organizations frequently use the children with a provocative view.
The Bassidje organization was created shortly after the Shah had been expelled by the new revolutionary power in order to use the young ones for a revolutionary purpose. Then, this organization joined the Pasdarans army, another military organization created after the revolution, to protect it against the Monarchists. The Pasdarans army decided to become an armed force, independant from the traditional army corps. During the war against Iraq, the Bassidje organization, including nearly half a million of members, was supervising the new volunteers. The young Bassidji (the Bassidje organization new member), between twelve and twenty years old, has been noticed by his total dedication and lack of fear in front of death. He has often been used as cannon fodder against the Iraq army. The Bassidje organization used to take advantage of the inability to live of those young teenagers, buoyed with revolutionary hope, unrealizable in life. By getting themselves tangled up in the Bassidje organization, these young people ready for martyrdom were escaping from real society and disillusion resulting from the vanishing of their dreams. The Bassidge organization was protecting the revolutionary dream from its change into a nightmare and preventing the collapse of the short-lived identity of its young members ; because of that, it had a huge success during the first years, when the revolution was still keeping its aura.
The cultural revolution has plunged China into some disorders and riots whose main part was played by the educated urban young people who were recruited in the Red Guards organization. These mobilized after some incitements and manoeuvres from President Mao and his close circle. However, even though they often gained from the support of the army and the political police, they had a real autonomy. But they totally gave it up by using it to imitate the revolutionary model which school and propaganda had taught them during violent riots and savage acts aimed at the Establishment. In such a context where the biological fathers had been caused to childhood and marginalized by the totalitarian system, they used to solicit a super-father's recognition, President Mao.
All through the Mozambian conflict and more particularly in the second half of the eighties, the RENAMO has kidnapped young children on an irregular basis according to the areas. It used to subject a certain amount of them to a military training and to a process of war socialization whose purpose was to turn good fighters out of them. Introduced to a culture of violence and guerilla as well as to its magic and religious representation of the world and action, the children-soldiers had access like this to a new identity of " cast warrior " which entirely integrated them into the organization. That practice was partly justified by the RENAMO recruitment problems and its strategy of terrorizing the civilians in which the young soldiers had an important part to play. However, it especially refered to the logic of the guerilla general way of operating which, as a war organization directed to its own reproduction, seems to have tried to institute a military aristocracy able to represent the values of its social war project and to garantee its perpetuation. This way of acting is very similar to some historical and local experiences.
The young people, as a category generally developed through a parental relationship, don't represent a social class or group, but a logical support to the official statements. This rhetorical attitude implicitly subjects the political analysis to far limits which include the whole society. That way, it allows an unidimensional comprehension where the sense of children's violence is reduced to the instrumentalization or underhand manoeuvre on the children by the adults. On the contrary, it is necessary to explain some situations of violent and war socialization of groups of children as the result of particular circumstances (China, Iran, Mozambic...). The process of growing up is the thread where is written any juvenile act. One can as well perceive in it part of the failure in the social reproduction or even the metaphor of society's suicide. It is probably the obscure conscience of the symbolic importance represented for everybody, from the point of view of sense, by this contribution of structural events in the leading behaviours - going from the specific to the general - which explains the obscure fascination of the juvenile violence and consequently the quasi general lack of it in the statements.