One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  In situations of protracted armed conflict, the opportunities for children to participate in hostilities are many, and it is only through a stringent effort not allowing them to fight, that youth can be kept out of military service. During the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar passed strict edicts against using child soldiers, even though they had been extremely helpful when fighting against the Russian occupation years earlier. Systems of punishment were established for commanders who used children who could not yet grow a beard. For a short while this worked, but in order to keep their forces strong against the Northern Alliance and the feudal militias who used children, the Taliban gave in to the temptation for cheap and easy labor, enlisting eager youths in scores, trucking in refugee children from sympathetic madrassahs in Pakistan.

  In the absence of a strong will to keep children and adolescents out of the army, history proves, they will join. During the American Revolutionary War, children found ways to fight. Hezekiah Packard enlisted at age thirteen after the rebel victory at Bunker Hill. Some boys, prevented from joining because of their age, argued until the recruiters, who had quotas to meet, let them join. During partisan resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland, Jewish children joined in droves.

  The choice was simple: die in a ghetto or concentration camp or go down fighting. The resistance needed these fighters and used them eagerly.

  In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo at the time I visited, no political will existed to stop youth from fighting. All parties to the conflict were actively engaged in recruiting children as soldiers, porters, and sex-slaves, even though the 1999 Lusaka Peace Accords called for the disarmament of child soldiers.

  When presented with evidence of minors below fifteen years of age in their ranks at the front lines, the head of the recognized government in Kinshasa’s Department of Foreign Affairs did admit, as Human Rights Watch reported, that they had “inherited” child soldiers recruited by the late President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, for the campaign he waged together with Rwandan forces against the Mobutu government in 1996 and 1997. It took several years for them to begin to demobilize some soldiers, and even though it was largely a cosmetic gesture.

  In December 2001, Kinshasa demobilized 3000 of its child soldiers. There was a large event as the children ended their service in the armed forces—UNICEF provided T-shirts. In response, the major rebel party in the east, RCD-Goma, committed to demobilizing 2,600 child soldiers. UNICEF did not send T-shirts. RCD-Goma demobilized only 140 of the 2,600 children. The rest were moved from the Mushaki military base forty kilometers outside the city of Goma to remote locations in the jungles of the Katanga province, far from the eyes of the international community. Could this have been a response to the slight by UNICEF for not delivering T-shirts or was the RCD simply unwilling to let their young recruits go? Some aid workers have indicated that most of these demobilizations are a sham. They only let the weakest or most troublesome young soldiers go. The undesirables. This rings true when one considers that very few girls ever participate in these demobilization events. The commanders want to keep their spoils.

  Driving into the area controlled by RCD-Goma in January 2002, I saw an armed border guard who could not have been older than fifteen. A few days later, I saw the boy again and asked my guide, who worked with an NGO trying to get kids out of the army, if this boy was a holdover from before the Lusaka Accords who had yet to be demobilized since the RCD signed and made a commitment to demobilize their child soldiers or if he was a new recruit.

  “That is difficult to say,” my guide told me. “I know this boy. He will be fifteen in May. He was a soldier before Lusaka, but he was demobilized in our center, given shelter and food until we could locate his family or place him somewhere. We found his family and he rejoined them. The army took him back a few months ago and he is a soldier again.”

  Authorities have acknowledged and sought to justify the continued use of child soldiers. In an interview broadcast on January 24, 2001, on the RCD-Goma’s Radio Goma, journalists asked Commander Obert Rwibasira of the RCD-Goma’s G5 military division why the movement continued to enroll very young recruits. He replied that RCD-Goma needed a “young and dynamic army.”

  The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), which has deployed not only in northern Uganda to fight the guerilla Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) but also into the eastern Congo, admits that it has underage fighters in its ranks, even fighters who have escaped from the LRA. “If somebody at seventeen years comes from the LRA and takes the choice that he wants to be in the army, would you send him away so that he returns to the rebel ranks or you help him become productive?” Shaban Bantariza, the Ugandan army spokesman said. “You let him return to the bush, which he has known for most of his life—or the lesser evil of taking him while slightly underage and give him a chance to change his life?” he added.

  At the same time as the Ugandan army seeks to justify its use of child soldiers, despite being a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (which forbids using child soldiers), Bantariza denies that it is their policy to do so. “Last year we got thirty recruits who had been duly recommended by the community councils, but after scrutinizing them [we found] they were underage and their applications were turned down,” he said. It seems the Ugandan army only recruits children who were previously abducted by the enemy, suggesting that they are damaged goods, that their protection as minors is less important than the protection of those who had not been abducted by the LRA already. Bantariza noted that there were few rehabilitation programs in northern Uganda that dealt with child soldiers and those NGOs operating in the region were already overstretched, preferring to take in younger children. Whatever the justification, the government of Uganda, far from protecting children from the threat of abduction by the LRA, continues to use youth on its front lines. Uganda’s commitments to international law do not seem to outweigh the benefits of using child soldiers. This is the modus operandi for most groups who use child soldiers. Public commitments matter little when there is a war on.

  While RCD-Goma claimed to be demobilizing all of its child soldiers, recruitment continued. In December 2001, a month before I met Paul in the demobilization center, RCD soldiers burst through the doors late at night. The raid happened quickly, and the armed soldiers ignored the objections and pleas of the civilian staff. When it was over, one hundred children had been taken back to the Mushaki military base. The staff showed me the bullet hole in the door and the broken lock. They complained that there was little they could do to protect the boys in their care if the army wanted them.

  In 2005, an aid worker in what used to be an area controlled by RCD-Goma said that, as the fragile peace in the region deteriorates, military commanders beef up their ranks with children. “[The Mayi Mayi] have realized we want the kids, so they won’t give them to us,” the aid worker said.

  The fighting in the Ituri region, which displaced over 80,000 people in the first four months of 2005, involved children ordered to maim civilians believed to be of rival ethnicities. Local defense forces—sometimes calling themselves the Mayi Mayi—also made use of children to protect against these attacks. While commitments to protect children are easy to make, breaking the habit of relying on young fighters is much harder.

  One boy, Augustin, told me about being taken by force into RCD-Goma. He told me he was sixteen years old. He was more likely fourteen years old. He said he was recruited when he was thirteen and spent one year as a soldier. He had only been at the transit center for a few months. It is likely that he was instructed to say he was fifteen if anybody asked when they took him into the army, again, because fifteen is the absolute minimum age allowed by international law for participation in the military. Now that a year had passed he said he was sixteen, improvising on his instructions.

  “I was forced into the army,” Augustin said. “The soldiers from the RCD passed by my house. They gave me supplies and told me to carry the things for them. After I carried supp
lies for them, they told me to go to the airport with the things. At the airport they instructed me to get on the plane with them to go to Goma. There were a lot of soldiers so I went. When we got to Goma they said, ‘You are no longer a civilian, but a proud soldier.’” Then they took him to Mushaki training camp and began teaching him to fight along side other kadogo, little ones. Girls and boys trained alongside each other at Mushaki, learning to march, obey orders, and shoot. As one boy told Anne Edgerton, an advocate with Refugees International, the child recruits “were fed once a day, the food generally consisted only of porridge, they had to sleep outside in the rain and they were beaten.”

  Xavier was abducted into the army in the middle of a soccer game. He was with his friends kicking the ball around when a group of soldiers pulled up in a truck. He demonstrated when we played in the courtyard, pointing out where the soldiers stood, casting the production with the other kids—and interrupting the main narrative with an essential detail, how he could juggle the ball for five kicks without it hitting the ground. The other boys in our soccer game played along for a moment. They took the role of his friends, also taken, or of the soldiers, cool as can be, rallying the children into the truck, making fun of Xavier’s soccer ball juggling bravado. Paul, whom I had already interviewed, played one of Xavier’s friends. He did not want to be one of the RCD soldiers. Musa, who had volunteered, played an RCD soldier with confidence, adding a swagger to his step and lowering his voice to a baritone growl, which made the others laugh.

  Many of the children knew this story all too well. Though they had fought in different armies, many of them had similar experiences, were taken the same way. All over the world, soccer games are interrupted by the realities of war and violence. The kids knew the parts to play in this scene, they played them ferociously well. There were moments with the shoving, with the role-playing soldiers when I wanted to intervene, but the moment passed quickly, the soccer game resumed, and Xavier returned to the bench where I sat, where the others could not hear, and continued his story.

  The men forced the kids into the back of the truck where they sat with two soldiers who had guns. The soldiers were from the RCD. I could well believe that Xavier, the gentle soccer player, didn’t want to go with them, was reluctant to become a warrior. Though picturing how he charged into danger as soon as he had the ball, I could also imagine him hopping in the back of a truck with a kind of youthful carelessness, looking for adventure. Regardless of his motivations at the moment, the soldiers had guns and did not offer the children a choice. They drove all of the children into the forest to begin their training. “At the training there were five girls and nine boys. We were all sent to the front line.”

  Xavier looked at me and crossed his arms on his chest. He said something to the translator with a nod of his head at me.

  “He wants to know if you want to hear about the battles,” the translator asked.

  I was thrown off. It seemed like such a painful subject to discuss. I was ashamed to say yes, I did want to hear about the battles. How does an adult ask a young person to talk about such horrible things? What kind of person wants to hear it and moreover, wants to write it down? I felt like a voyeur, but listened intently.

  On the front, they clashed with the Mayi Mayi, the militia with which Paul had fought. In the rehabilitation center, the boys got along quite well. On the day Xavier described, they may have been shooting at each other. I was glad the other boys were absorbed in their soccer game again, showing no interest in our conversation. Maybe they already knew each other’s stories, maybe they didn’t want to know.

  Xavier and his unit were patrolling through the jungle when machine gun fire cut through the trees. Xavier spoke in a level voice as he described the battle. He uncrossed his arms and leaned forward, looking at his hands on the table. He began to pick at a splinter in the wood.

  The guns crackled against the trees. Everyone was shouting. The other children were afraid. Everything went silent for a moment and then the air came alive once more with fire. The commander yelled orders at the kids. Whenever one of them left the cover of trees or bushes, he was mowed down by the enemy guns.

  Suddenly, a barrage of bullets tore through the commander, the one adult among the youngsters. It was fear of this adult that kept them in battle. Without him, Xavier felt no reason to stay in the hell of machine guns blasts and shouting children. With his commander dead, he escaped. He ran away from the bullets and into the mysterious jungle that he had never been in before. He knew only that whatever he found would be better than his chances in the army.

  “I have killed many people, I think, but I don’t know. I don’t count. It is better to forget those things. If I could speak to my recruiters now,” he said, “I would tell them to study and learn, not to become soldiers. I suffered very much.”

  “What happened to the girls in your unit? You said there were five?” He looked up at me surprised, as if the answer was obvious.

  “All of them died,” he said.

  Girls are used in the army for a variety of purposes. Michel, a sixteen-year-old at the center who may have actually been sixteen, told me that he and his sister joined the army because their parents were dead and they had no jobs.

  “I went to the front line many times and my sister was sent to the enemy to be a spy. Girls were sent to be prostitutes and get information from the enemy. This is how my sister was used. She is still there.”

  Michel had seen dozens of battles. He listed the locations of fighting in which he participated against the Mayi Mayi and the interhamwe in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, sites of some of the most intense violence in the war. He drew pictures of weapons and spoke with terrible accuracy about their technical details for such a young person with so little formal schooling.

  “This is a Kalashnikov rifle and this is an R4 5.56mm gun and this is a 60mm mortar. This is an RPG.” He pointed each part of his drawing out, and though to me they looked generic enough, in each of them he saw a very specific object with a very specific meaning to him (Figure 20). I was reminded of Keto and his use of terms like repatriation, transit centers, and rationing. Nothing magical about this boy’s use of technical terms for weapons. They were the words that made the world in which he lived.

  A Human Rights Watch report on the use of child soldiers in the eastern Congo describes the use of child soldiers at the front lines, and from this I could imagine what Michel had been through, though he did not want to talk about the battles:

  [The children] were trained on how to use arms and how to shoot, and that was the end of it. Some of the kids were even sent to battle without arms. They were sent ahead of battle-ready troops of the RCD and RPA to create a diversion. They were ordered to make a lot of noise, using sticks on tree trunks and the like. When they succeeded in diverting the attention of government troops, that is to say when they drew government fire on their unarmed elements, these units, known as the Kadogo Commando, would be literally allowed to fall like flies under government fire. The experienced troops would then attack the government troops when their attention was diverted to the Kadogo Commando.

  “During the fighting,” says Michel, “I left the front lines with the commander.” They went to sleep by the roadside on their way back to Mushaki base. Early in the morning, when the first birds were starting to sing, Michel looked around. His commander was still asleep. He stood up, left his uniform behind so he looked like a poor peasant boy, and ran away. He did not have a clean getaway.

  The same men who had recruited him into the army recognized him when he arrived in his village again. They demanded that he return to the army. He feared that he would be beaten for trying to escape. The recruiters told him that they were ashamed he was such a coward, that he had made a promise that he was breaking and that that was wrong. They told him they would punish him themselves if he did not return. Michel gave in and returned to the army.

  He was finally demobilized officially when Save the Children interve
ned and lobbied on his behalf. Save the Children works with army commanders and recruiters, educating them on the rights of children and the responsibilities of the army under international law. They lobby on the policy level with the United Nations as well as on a case-by-case basis for children like Michel, who said that when he grows up, he wants to be “a driver or a mechanic. A civilian.” But this lobbying is hardly successful. What do the recruiters care about children’s rights when they have quotas to meet and money to earn? As Dr. Peter Singer, author of Children at War, points out, most armies already know that using child soldiers will be frowned on by history, that they will be judged for doing it. Why else would belligerent parties that use child soldiers constantly deny or seek to justify doing so?

  Michel’s sister was still in the army, and her chances for survival were slim. Very few girls are released from armed groups that use child soldiers. They are kept as domestic workers and “wives,” or are reluctant to leave of their own volition because, as victims of rape, they fear becoming pariahs in their own communities. If they have had a child while with the military group their ability to escape is hampered. Given the physical and psychological trauma of rape, the exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, and the harsh conditions of life in the bush, I imagine not many of the young women survive, or if they do, can reintegrate back into society. In some cases, a sense of duty to the families they have formed with their commanders holds them captive.