SMURFS ARE those darling little blue elves from the 1980s animated children's series of the same name. The epitome of kitsch, Smurfs have remained popular for more than two decades. There are Smurf figurines, greeting cards, Pez dispensers, mugs, books and dolls.
Now, however, there are Smurf corpses as well. The United Nations Children's Fund plans to air a new Smurf video clip aimed at adults in Europe, Latin America and Australia as part of a campaign to raise funds for war-affected children in Burundi, Congo and Sudan.
It starts off with the familiar: happy Smurf families singing and dancing amid their cute, mushroom-shaped homes. But suddenly bombs darken the sky, and Smurf huts burst into flames. In the final scene, a surviving baby Smurf sits weeping, surrounded by charred huts and the corpses of dead Smurfs.
In an era in which representation often trumps reality, UNICEF hopes the image of war-orphaned Smurfs will be more effective in shocking people into opening their wallets than footage of real war-affected children.
"We see so many images that we don't really react anymore," explained Julie Lamoureux of Publicis, the ad agency that created the spot for UNICEF. "We wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood."
I'm sympathetic. In 1997, I wrote a report for Human Rights Watch on child soldiers in northern Uganda, most of whom had been forced into combat by rebels. We interviewed children who had seen their parents slaughtered and who had been coerced into participating in the brutal slayings of other children. Our report generated all the media attention a human rights advocate could wish for, but somehow none of it made much difference. Public interest faded, though Uganda's civil war continues.
This story is hardly unique. In conflicts from Burundi and Sierra Leone to Gaza, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq, children continue to be recruited as soldiers. Among civilians, children are maimed and killed when they step on landmines or pick up stray cluster bomblets, and they're often the first to succumb to the hunger and disease that accompanies war.
But it's excruciatingly difficult to get people to stop and think about any of these tragedies, much less take out their checkbooks or call their elected representatives.
