NYALA, Sudan — Many childhoods have come to a screeching halt in western Sudan during the recent bout of fighting. Some youngsters have been killed. Others, like a baby-faced teenager named Mubarak, have been forced to grow up fast.
The children of Darfur have seen awful things: burning, looting, rape and death. They have been the targets of violence as well. Aid workers say that sex has been forced on girls as young as 8. Other children have been shot or otherwise brutalized, and many have gone without adequate nutrition for months.
"A child is supposed to be growing up protected from the world," said Francis M. Deng, the United Nations representative on internally displaced persons. "They should be playing and learning. If your life is interrupted so fundamentally, you are denied the basics needed to grow up healthy."
Take the case of Mubarak, who had been a typical 15-year-old in this part of the world, which meant he worked the fields with his father during the planting and harvesting seasons but ran off with his friends whenever he could.
Want, Violence and Death Steal Childhoods From Sudan's Young....
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