Word: belfast
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Muslim's guarantee of eternal life. In Burma, where Karen rebels have been fighting for independence for 41 years, combat has become the family business. Northern Ireland is not officially at war, but a state of siege between two religions has made violence the expected. As Alexander Lyons, a Belfast psychologist, dryly says, "It's the children who don't throw stones that are abnormal...
...gang-related murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach the carnage of Beirut or El Salvador on a per capita basis, it is higher than that of Belfast or Burma. The U.S. Army has begun sending doctors to train in the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Watts, because there they can get 24-hour-a-day experience treating the kind of gunshot wounds normally seen only in battle...
...battle wounds seem self-inflicted. In Third World war zones, combatants have no real alternative to war. For the child soldier in Burma or Afghanistan, there are no Big Brothers or child psychologists laboring to keep them out of harm's way. American inner-city kids, like those of Belfast, do have alternatives to gang shootings and street riots. Those opportunities may seem faint, but society does provide American and Northern Irish children with a semblance of choice...
Every war has rules of engagement. Even the random bursts of street violence in Belfast follow a certain code. Chuckie, 11, explains how it works. When instructed to blockade a street, it is O.K. to steal public vans and buses but not private cars, because those, he says, "could belong to one of your own." The summer he turned ten, Chuckie came upon three teenagers in ski masks hijacking a plumber's van. He impulsively flung himself into the back of the truck; after the hijackers crashed the van and set it on fire, Chuckie helped pour gasoline...
John plays drums in a Republican band, the only legal way for kids in Belfast to flaunt their defiance. Like almost all Catholic ghetto kids, he's been in and out of trouble with the law since he was a child, but he has been extra careful since his last arrest two years ago. He wears his brown hair short, but not punk short, and he has no tattoos or earrings. He wears a blue Windbreaker and jeans. He is earnest, painstakingly sincere and a walking encyclopedia of the I.R.A. party line -- he has carefully shed any trace...