Four years ago, Patricio Galvez sat on a plane to Syria with a suitcase full of toys and children’s clothes. His daughter was killed in a grenade attack, and the IS fighter she was married to died in the final attack against the extremist group. With this, the seven children were orphaned, and alone in the notorious al-Hol camp. In a hospital in Erbil, he met them for the first time, malnourished and sick. The eldest boy showed signs of severe trauma after seeing his father shot and killed. Galvez together with his seven grandchildren. The picture was taken in 2019. Photo: Private To news, the grandfather says that he thinks they have done quite well under the circumstances. He says they are happy at their schools in Sweden, and have friends they love to play with. Some have started basketball, tennis and swimming. One child likes to sing. They’re not so small anymore either. The oldest are almost teenagers, and the youngest turns five this year. – He was close to death twice, but is today a very strong and wise boy. It is very beautiful to see him running and laughing. He’s very lazy, a bit like me. A bit of the same Latino look, says the Swedish-Chilean, laughing. – The first need the children had was just to feel safe again, and that they were together with family. They simply needed to feel loved again, and to feel that they hadn’t done anything wrong. The one-year-old that Galvez brought home in 2019 was seriously ill and malnourished. Photo: Privat Recently, Galvez has been contacted by several universities, for research on war children and radicalisation. One, at Lund University, compares the way children of German soldiers were treated by Scandinavian countries after the Second World War with the way children of IS soldiers are treated today. Galvez believes the project is important. He criticizes the Scandinavian countries for a lack of protection for their own children’s rights, when the children are outside the country’s borders. A flaw in the system When Galvez first learned that his daughter and father of the children had been killed, he asked the authorities in Sweden for help in getting the children home. – In Sweden, we have the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that children should get help immediately, but they did not give that help. They acted on the assumption that people thought the children were ticking bombs, says Galvez. The suitcase was packed full of children’s clothes and toys when Galvez traveled to collect the children in Syria. Photo: Kristin Grønning He says that Norway too, and “above all” Denmark, have shown reluctance to bring home children from the al-Hol camp. Norwegian-Swedish Michael Skråmo is the father of the seven children. Photo: Facebook – So there is a gap there that we really should investigate and correct, because it is a great frustration for those of us who end up in these conflicts. Today, the children live in foster families, which Galvez says he and their grandmother were involved in choosing. In recent years, they have been able to visit each other “as much as we want and can”, according to Galvez. He thinks the Swedish authorities have done a good job of taking care of them after they arrived in Sweden. Want to learn from the post-war period Martina Koegeler-Abdi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Human Rights and History at Lund University. Martina Koegeler-Abdi is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University. Photo: Lund University She has recently been researching Scandinavian war children, who are called Children born of war (CBOW) in English. The purpose is not to compare the ideologies of the Nazis and IS, but to look at their status as children of “mothers met with distrust and fathers who are enemies”. Koegeler-Abdi believes that the historical perspective can help to “solve” what she calls a stagnant process, where the country avoids deciding whether the children who are left should be taken home or not. A child in the Syrian al-Hol camp, which houses the families of members of IS. The picture was taken in 2019. Photo: DELIL SOULEIMAN / AFP – International aid organizations and UN organizations are very clear that yes, based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a state’s responsibility should not stop at national borders. The Norwegian and Swedish authorities disagree, but at the same time recognize the humanitarian needs of these children. So it’s a weird standstill. Nothing happens. – The way this strange contradiction emerges, “yes we want to save the children, but no it is more important to punish the mothers”, and how the punishment of the mothers trumps the children’s needs as long as they are outside of Scandinavia, I think this resonates very strongly with examples from second world war. German-Danish “Helmut” found his father too late Several of the children only found out about their backgrounds in adulthood, because the relationship between the parents was taboo. One of the interviewees, called “Helmut”, learned that he was the son of a German soldier when he turned 14. His mother told him this, but did not want to say anything more about who he was. In 2004, he tried to persuade her to tell him his name. – Why do you want to know this? Your father has been dead for a long time, she replied. The answer caused him to stumble. How could he know that? At the same time, he respected his mother’s need not to talk about it. When she died, he tried to find his father again, and found the German side of the family in 2010. They confirmed that his father had died, but only a year earlier. – He missed the chance by a year, says Koegeler-Abdi. – Nevertheless, “Helmut” said that he would not have done anything differently if he had known about it. Mora’s needs would have been prioritized, regardless. Debate about where one belongs Most of the Scandinavian children whose fathers were German soldiers remained in Norway and Denmark after the Second World War. A couple of hundred traveled to Germany and were left there after the war ended. Of the children who are supposed to have been repatriated from Germany after the war, Koegeler-Abdi has found archived evidence of debate about 97 Norwegians, 32 Danes, five Finns and one Swede. Until now, she has mostly spoken to adult war children who have a German father and a Danish mother. She says that after the war the international welfare offices had to define war children as “non-German”, and thus “innocent”, in order for them to be valid candidates for government aid. Children of German soldiers and Norwegian women in the “Lebensborn” program, who had birth homes in Norway. Photo: NTB / NTB In today’s debate about repatriating children of Scandinavians in IS, it is largely about the danger of radicalisation, she says. – I think that a shift from calling these children “terrorist children” to “war children” is a way of destigmatizing the situation. – If you only think about the terrible things IS has done, it seems that children’s rights are losing their footing. Fear of radicalization The organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) has collected the experiences of around a hundred children who have returned to France, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, among others. They have, in the same way as Galvez, experienced that the children were able to settle “surprisingly well” after they were brought home to these countries. – Children who have been rescued from the horrors of the camps are doing well at school, have made new friends and are building new lives in their home countries, says Jo Becker, who is director of children’s rights at HRW. Norway is not mentioned in the report, but has so far accepted eight children. There are currently four Norwegian children interned in Syria. Three of the grandchildren of Patricio Galvez, as they looked in 2019. Photo: SVT Sweden is one of the countries that receives sharp criticism. HRW writes that reunifications have been difficult and in some cases led to the children being exposed to further stress. Galvez believes that the authorities, police and organizations that work with radicalization must cooperate better with relatives and relatives. – Indoctrination, of course it happens constantly and systematically, above all in a context where you are in an area where the way of thinking is as open as it was during the caliphate. – But now my grandchildren have returned to Sweden. They grow up with completely different values, and a place with different values and different opinions, where they themselves can explore what is right and wrong. There are no signs that they are radicalised. I think the opposite is the case, actually.
ttn-69
– No signs that mine are radicalized – Urix
