To put a face to the brutal story of Kausar Bano is to give a voice to her 70-year-old father. Mercifully, Khaliq Noor Mohammad Sheikh didn't see the mobs slitting Kausar's womb with a sword, dragging out the unborn child that nestled within her and burning both in Naroda Patiya on February 28. He had fainted - when he woke up, he couldn't even find the charred remains of Kausar Bano and her unborn child. 

"I found out how my daughter and her baby had been killed after I went to the Shah Alam relief camp. They could have killed me and spared my pregnant daughter," sobs Sheikh. "My daughter got married only last year. This would have been her first child. And they did not even allow it to come into this world." 

CED Ref:Gujarat/children/kausar.htm  

Life among the graves  
...The only body he found was of his daughter Kausar. Nine months pregnant, the baby due any day. When he found her, her mouth was caked with froth, her stomach cut open, the foetus burned by her side... 

CED Ref: Gujarat/children/Khaled-Kausar's-father.htm  

First came the mobs--burning pillaging, murdering and raping in front of the eyes of these hapless children. Then came displacement-after their homes were torched. Suddenly, family, friends and schools are a chimera. Dr R. Srinivasa Murthy, professor of psychiatry at the Bangalore-based National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), who visited some of the camps, found  the children in a state of shock. "The trauma seen in children who survived the riots in Gujarat is similar to the trauma children suffered after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Uttarkashi earthquake and the earthquake in the state." So they end up extremely prone to anxiety disorders, acute depression and stress. 

Possibly even worse. When the Ahmedabad-based NGO Centre For Development tried to involve the camp children in art classes, they ended up drawing burning houses and dead people. "There is a lot of anger among the children," says Mira Mehta of the centre. "You will see a lot of small, silent children playing around in the camps. They don't look rattled but they are badly affected inside." That's not hard to discover. A three year-old boy playing in the camp says occasionally: "Abba Ko mar diya. Goli, goli! (They killed my father. Bullet, Bullet!)". 

Counselling will be futile, say psychiatrists, as long as the carnage continues. "There is so much fear and anger among children and we can't even tell them that it is all over. Until it stops, how can they begin healing?" asks Sandhya  Surendradas of the NGO  Sanchetna's child survival project. 

CED Ref: Gujarat/children/children-nightmare.htm 

" Children have a photographic memory and it is difficult to remove from their minds the images of violence they witness," said Nagpal, referring to what in medical terms is referred to a post-traumatic stress disorder. Medical experts point out that the Gujarat violence has created two categories of children - the violence-displaced in the relief camps and those who continue to live in their own homes. 

Twelve-year-old Bilal watched in horror as his mother and elder brother were beaten to death and thrown into a burning truck. It was the same lorry in which moments earlier they were fleeing from rampaging mobs in Kalol village of Gujarat's Panchmahals district. 

Fourteen-year-old Javed will never forget the horrendous sight of a mob slitting open the stomach of his pregnant cousin Kausar Bano, killing the mother and her unborn child, in the Naroda-Patiya neighbourhood of Ahmedabad. Eleven-year-old Shamshun Nisha saw three people being burnt alive even as she huddled with her family on the roof of their apartment block in Dani Limda area of Ahmedabad. 

Eleven-year-old Tehzeem Bano will never understand why even women wielded swords during the carnage. Bilal, Javed, Shamshun and Tehnzeem were among about a dozen children who displayed remarkable equanimity today as they relived the horrors of the sectarian violence that swept Gujarat since February-end, leaving about 950 persons dead. 

CED Ref: Gujarat/children/children-revenge.htm