One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  Keto used his considerable skills at reading people and an amazing amount of energy to manage his emotional and physical survival. Helping the “old man” he lives with, I believe, provided him with some of the strength he needed to deal with stresses he experienced and continues to experience.

  Alienated from his peers, Michael held on to the image of his father for support. He told me it made him sad to think of, but that it also gave him a goal. He held on to his past as a source of hope and enjoyed talking about the ways his father would trade and make deals, would drive around on the motorcycle he had, selling goods. Michael was not at all content with his situation. He didn’t go to school anymore, and he didn’t like living with the other boys his age. He wanted to get out into the adult world, not be regarded as a child anymore. I think he was frustrated with the assistance programs that treated him like a child, giving him no say in his own future.

  “I escaped from the Congo. I know how to travel. I would like to travel and see the world,” he said. “Not stay here.”

  Then there was Melanie, a girl I met the same day I met Michael. She had just been playing jump rope at the well when we met, and her red dress was splotched with dust. Her tiny hands fluttered like moths while we talked, always moving or picking at something.

  She has few memories of her past from which to draw inspiration (at least that she told me about) and her future is highly uncertain. “They tell me I am thirteen, but I do not know,” she said. She lives with her teacher, the wife of a man who rescued her from the fighting in the Congo.

  “I do not know where I come from. When we fled the fighting in Congo, I missed the truck with my mother on it. The Congolese soldiers put her on a truck. I do not know where she is now. She is Rwandan. I got lost and a man found me in the brush. He took me with him to Tanzania, but there were guns.”

  “Guns?” I asked, looking at her drawing which was filled with weapons (Figure 5).

  “I saw the guns when they came to kill the man I was with. All the things, guns and spears. They wanted to kill the man because he was a soldier. We hid for two days under a bridge that had a roadblock on it. Then he paid for me to take a boat into Tanzania. I was happy to get to Tanzania because of the war. When I arrived I felt safe. They told me not to speak Rwandan, because of the militia, even in the camp. My teacher taught me to speak Swahili, so now I do not speak Rwandan with anyone. It is safer for me. I feel safe now, in the camp, most of the time. My teacher says she will help me find my mother when the war is over and we go back to Congo. I will let my mother decide if I should stay with her or with my teacher.”

  Melanie is not simply vulnerable because she is young or because she is a girl. Her ethnic status—Rwandan, as she said, meaning Tutsi—makes her more vulnerable. Her teacher’s warnings reveal that even the act of speaking could be dangerous for her. She must deny her own language in order to survive. Her safety, even outside the war zone, is linked directly to the political situation in the Congo. Young girls from different ethnic groups have very different experiences in the refugee camp, though only through spending time getting to know Melanie would someone realize how different her needs might be from other little girls, how different the threats against her.

  The Rwandan government is the principal power backing the rebel government of the eastern Congo, the RCD. Their enemies, such as the Mayi Mayi, the interhamwe, and the recognized government in Kinshasa, have created a fear of the Rwandans, of Tutsis, that runs deep. Through their own human rights abuses, their actions without regard for Congolese civilians, and their exploitation of the Congo’s resources, Rwanda’s army and the RCD have helped in the creation of this fear.

  “The war is caused by Rwandan soldiers,” said Robert, a young boy living in a shelter for street children in Bukavu in the eastern Congo, just across Lake Tanganyika from the refugee camps in Tanzania.

  “The Rwandans kill people. They massacre. I’ve seen it myself, you know. I’ve seen someone sell a cow and everybody knows he sold the cow and the soldiers came and demanded money from him. If he didn’t give them money, they’d cut his throat. I could find a Rwandan who would cut a throat for $100. I could find him with you right now, if you want to.”

  I declined the boy’s offer.

  The fear of the Rwandans illustrated to me just how difficult it was for young people to form their own identities when the situation around them dictates so many terms. The young have an advantage over adults, because they can be more adaptable to new settings, but they have the added pressure of adapting to a new society at the same time as becoming socialized within the family, sometimes not their own families. It is hard enough for an adolescent to define him-or herself in peacetime, managing the expectations of family and society while trying to define oneself. Add to that armed conflict and ethnic strife, and one can imagine the challenges adolescents like Melanie face. This makes her cheerful manner all the more remarkable.

  Melanie was forced to change her cultural heritage, abandon her language, and has formed an attachment to her teacher. If she were to embrace her past, embrace the memory of her mother and her mother’s people, she would be in danger. I could not determine with which army the husband of this teacher fought, but it is possible that the dangers of failure to adapt, of forming new bonds with this teacher, are more than psychological and could come from within the family that cares for her. Luckily, it seemed, Melanie enjoyed her relationship with her teacher, who genuinely seemed to care for her. At the time we met, she did not seem to be suffering from the sense of loneliness that plagues many unaccompanied minors. Perhaps because of the effectiveness of her assimilation, she managed to make friends and find supportive adults, unlike another Tutsi boy I met, Justin.

  Justin, fourteen years old, lived in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda. Unlike Melanie, he often felt lonely, isolated, and afraid. He was a tall, gawky kid who liked to study and read when he had the chance. He did not have many friends. Justin fled to Congo with his mother during the genocide in 1994. His father didn’t make it out, he told me.

  “We lived in Congo for a while, then the war there started. People were killed; people remained behind, desperate. That is where my mother was killed.”

  I have to assume from the time he fled that Justin is from the Tutsi ethnic group. This is not a subject we would discuss openly in this refugee camp. It would not be safe.

  In April 1994 Rwanda President Juvénal Habyarimana was assassinated. Within a few hours, the Hutu Power government, built on a platform of ethnic superiority to Tutsi minority, accused Tutsi extremists of orchestrating the assassination. They called on the population to kill every Tutsi in the country as a matter of national security. Though the outbreak of violence seemed spontaneous to outsiders, General Roméo Dallaire, the UN force commander in Rwanda at the time, observed, the Hutu Power Movement had been preparing the mass slaughter for months. As early as February, teachers had been recording the ethnicity of their pupils, even though children were not required to carry ID cards. It would not become apparent to the general what had really been going on until teachers began murdering their Tutsi pupils.

  On the night of April 6, the Hutu ethnic majority in Rwanda began a campaign of extermination against the Tutsi minority and against moderate Hutus. In around a hundred days, or three months, more than 800,000 people were killed. Most of the violence was committed with farming implements, hoes and machetes, mostly by bands of young men, the interhamwe, which translates as those who attack together. The interhamwe later fled to the Congo, providing the pretext for Rwanda’s invasion and occupation.

  There are accounts from the spring and summer of 1994 of neighbors killing each other, of priests and nuns killing their Tutsi parishioners or moderate Hutus, of mixed families turning the blades on their Tutsi wives or husbands or in-laws, caught up in the genocidal fever. Thousands of Tutsis and Hutus opposed to the genocide fled to the Congo and Tanzania to escape the killing. Paul Kagame, an exiled Tutsi soldier, led an attack
on Rwanda from Uganda and took over the country. He stopped the genocide by the end of the summer. The interhamwe and the former Hutu Power politicians—the architects of the genocide—along with hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutus, fled from Kagame’s army into Mobutu’s Zaire. The images of this exodus, captured in vivid photographs by Sabastião Salgado, seem like a relic of another time, biblical or medieval, but certainly not the end of the twentieth century, certainly not 1994.

  When conflict erupted in Congo (then Zaire) in 1998 after the ouster of Mobutu, many Congolese Tutsis or Banyamulenge, who were not Rwandan, became targets of the Mayi Mayi local defense forces or of government forces. Hutus from Rwanda, whether they were involved in the killings or not, became targets for RCD-Goma and the Rwandan army.

  Still unsafe in the Congo, Rwandans of both ethnic groups fled once more, across the lake to Tanzania. Children, like Justin and Melanie have spent most of their lives without a homeland, without permanent homes. The dangers of ethnicity, of ethnic nationalism, the dangers of hate have chased them from their homes and followed them into the camps.

  Justin told me that he saw his mother killed; he was hiding and watched it happen.

  “One day the soldiers came and they cut my mother. They killed my mother with the big knives they had. I tried not to look, but I heard the noises they made and she made. Not loud noises, but I remember them.

  “I ran away, and while I was running, I hurt myself. I met a Banyamulenge man.” The Banyamulenge are another ethnic group in East Africa, Congolese brethren of the Tutsi in Rwanda. “I told him my problems and cried to him. He was kind and he helped me get to Tanzania. The family I lived with first, they abused me. They took my food and blankets and were very cruel. I do not know if it is because I am an orphan or because I am Rwandan. I do not know why. I was moved by the Red Cross and live here now. It is very bad. I cry every day when I get home from school. I think about my mother and no one comes to comfort me.” By this point his eyes welled with tears. “I do not know how I will get over this. It would be better just to forget.”

  Without any ties to his culture or his family, Justin feels adrift. He is lonely, he says, but he is beginning to feel better. “I am learning to forget.

  “I like to go to school, though there are not enough books.” When I try to focus on those aspects of Justin’s life that he finds positive, that are making him feel better, he does not hesitate to answer: “I went to a training for children about rights.”

  CORD, the organization that helps provide for the unaccompanied minors in Lugufu camp, has given adolescents training in children’s rights. This kind of involvement in his own well-being has given him motivation to wipe the tears from his eyes, go outside, and get involved with the world he lives in. As he speaks about rights, showing me his drawings on which he has written various empowering statements from the Declaration on the Rights of the Child, he becomes more animated, visibly more confident and eager to talk. He does not avert his eyes to look at the ground as he had for most of our conversation until that point.

  “I learned that children have the right to go to school.” He shows me his drawing of a boy walking toward a church. Written in Swahili above it is, “The child has the right to do all kinds of work and go to school” (Figure 6).

  “School will help me get a good job and become a professional. I would like to live in an urban area again. Here, the environment is very bad. Sometimes people don’t even use the toilets. And when you get sick, it is a long walk to the hospital and then, sometimes, you can’t get anyone to help you.”

  Justin’s concerns about public health and cleanliness, his concerns about school resources, were pressing on him. He was aware that schooling was a way to secure his future, one of his “rights,” and that he was in danger of disease from the poor hygienic conditions in the camp. These stresses weighed on his mind a great deal—he brought them up or alluded to them during our talk several times, expressing frustration and once, nearly cried when discussing the uncleanliness. He felt helpless against these things and had no one to whom he could turn. Though he understood the rights he and all children should have, he could do little to realize them, and that might have contributed to his sadness, the realization of just how much he was at the mercy of forces much greater than he was, entire governments and armies and institutions that controlled his fate. A heavy burden of awareness for anyone, let alone a fourteen-year-old orphan.

  I liked Justin, though I’m not sure why. He was not as well-spoken as Keto, nor as eager to impress as Michael, nor as cheerful and buoyant as Melanie. He was charismatic, and I wanted him to feel his own worth. With his interest in children’s rights evident, we talked about my project of researching the lives of young people affected by war. He liked the idea of being an ambassador for young people in situations like his.

  “What would you tell someone your age who has never been in a refugee camp so that he could understand what it is like?” I asked him. Justin thought for a moment, choosing his words carefully.

  “I would like to tell my name so that he could know me,” he answered. “I would tell him that living in the camp is very bad. I think about going home, but who will I go back to? Everyone is dead. If I talk to this boy who has never been in a refugee camp I would be happy. I want to find children with hope.”

  These journeys that children are forced to make are not confined to Africa. Right now, there are an estimated 20 million children uprooted from their homes around the world, living either as refugees, “migrants,” or internally displaced persons.

  “There were many hardships on the journey [from Burma],” Siha said. He was sitting on the floor of the largest room in his little house in Thailand, in a city where many illegal Burmese migrants sought safety. He wore a soccer jersey and black running shorts and poked his tongue out in concentration as he drew his pictures, like eleven-year-olds I had met in other parts of the world. He lived with his aunt, his cousin, and his mother, though his mother was away for a few weeks at the time we met.

  “We walked for two days, and it was raining the whole time, and then we rode horses, but my mother and aunt walked. And the river was flooded. We rode with buffalo and cows on a boat and it was very hard. I was afraid to leave home, but I was with my mother so it was okay. Everything was different here. The place to sleep and the place to live were different. We did not know where we would eat or what we would eat. In Burma, my grandmother would send me to the market for her and it was a very long way. I remember going there and walking far from home to buy different things. Here we did not know what things we would have.”

  Siha is considered a migrant because, as a member of the Shan ethnic group, he is not eligible for refugee status in Thailand.

  During his journey, Siha had the protection of his family, his mother taking care of things, making sure the children could ride horses instead of walking. As psychiatrists Joseph Westermeyer and Karen Wahmanholm observed in their work with refugee children, fleeing can seem like an adventure if children have a parent or parents insuring continuity and taking responsibility for their survival and well-being. Culturally, the differences in what constitutes childhood affect the way the young experience flight into exile, as do the differences in the wars being fought. In Congo, with the ravages of AIDS and the protracted intensity of the fighting, societal norms have broken down to such a degree that family structures become unraveled and few people have the resources, either emotional or material, to support children who are not their own. Additionally, it is not unusual for young boys to have responsibilities outside the home or for young girls to take care of their siblings. Unaccompanied minors are much more common in the Congo and in refugee camps in East Africa than in the Burmese communities in Thailand. This could also be due to the fact that on the journey out of Burma into Thailand there are several checkpoints controlled by one or another army, dense jungles filled with land mines and armed patrols, and young people on their own simply do not survive.

&
nbsp; “It was hard to cross the border. There are robbers, Mon soldiers, Burmese soldiers, Karen soldiers, all wanting money. We had to pay many times at many checkpoints. It was dangerous,” said Nicholas, an eleven-year-old boy from the Karen ethnic group.

  On their own, children cannot pay the bribes; perhaps they join or are forced to join the soldiers; perhaps they are turned back by the soldiers and sent home. The Thai authorities regularly round up the Burmese refugees (they are seen as illegal migrants), and send them back to the border areas. Unaccompanied minors would be easy targets for these roundups. They would also be easy prey for the flourishing sex industry in Thailand. On the streets of Bangkok, one can see countless young male and female prostitutes. Due to all these conditions, it is harder to find the Burmese youth who are living on their own. Neither the pimps nor the Thai police nor the Burmese military or rebel groups are inclined to give researchers like me access to the children they control. Though these children may exist in Thailand, I would not have the opportunity to meet them.

  Among the Burmese children I met, most of whom had at least one member of their family with them, the troubles of the journey, of the violence witnessed or experienced, were mitigated by the support they received.

  “Sometimes I don’t sleep well, and my mother comes to me. I tell her I’m having bad dreams and she tells me it’s okay. We’re here now and we are safe. But I don’t always feel safe,” Nicholas confided in me. We were in a city near the Thai-Burma border, a place where police corruption is rampant and smuggling flourishes in diamonds, drugs, weapons, and people. Burmese children are particularly vulnerable, and these stresses bother Nicholas as much as the memories of his village.