The stakes recently got higher. In January this year, an eastern Congolese
warlord, Thomas Lubanga, became the first person to be indicted by the
International Criminal Court in its DRC investigation. The charge is child
conscription – now a war crime. The case is followed by local commanders.
Some have been eager to give up their minors to avoid prosecution, but
others cling on to them, scared to incriminate themselves.
Baseme was 13 when he was recruited by the forces of Laurent Nkunda, the
evangelical Christian warlord and self-styled saviour of the Tutsi people.
He spent a year fighting for the group before being released under an early
demobilisation plan. But in August, fighting flared again between Nkunda’s
men and government troops close to the village where he had returned to live
with his family. Baseme and his friend Vincent, who served with him in the
rebel forces, learnt that Nkunda’s forces were again snatching children. “We
heard they had taken them en masse from a school in Kitchanga,” Baseme
recalls. Their families knew that the boys were at great risk. “When a
commander needs people he will just go and take children back,” Save the
Children’s Muhindo explains. “The ex-child soldiers are targeted first
because they are already trained.”
Baseme’s family fled with Vincent’s to the Bulengo camp just outside Goma, a
grim expanse of wooden and sacking shelters on the dull grey of a volcanic
rock flow from Mount Kivu. They were among the first; now there are more
than 30,000 people there. Among them is a school class that fled with their
teachers when Nkunda’s forces burst in looking for recruits. The fighting
has raised fresh terrors – and old ones. “I go to sleep and I think of the
people I killed,” says Baseme. “I think they are coming alive to kill me.
It’s like a film. I see it everywhere, here at the camp, back at home.”
Tunga, 15, has been out of the militia for two years. Clad in a SpongeBob
SquarePants T-shirt and camouflage combat trousers, he looks exactly like
the contradiction he is: a child soldier so bold he refused to smoke ganga
before he fought, who became his commander’s bodyguard at 12, but who speaks
softly of the psychological scars of soldiering with the wisdom of an older
man.
“It was important not to show fear, so I didn’t,” he remembers of his first
time at the front. Children often saw the worst of battle: they were the
ones pushed to the fore of the battle, against an enemy who did the same.
“It was always that way, with the children at the front. At the beginning I
was very affected when I killed someone, but I had no choice. I didn’t know
any longer whether it was good or bad. It was as if my heart was damaged. I
would shoot and see someone fall and I didn’t care.”
When he returned home, his parents were happy to see him, prepared in advance
for his return. But he still could not tell anyone what he had seen,
especially when he returned to school. “Everyone called me child soldier and
I didn’t like it, because it brought back all the bad memories,” he said. He
could no longer understand his lessons, so gave up and began training in
tailoring at a rehabilitation workshop for former child soldiers.
Girls are the biggest challenge to reintegrate. Up to a third of children
recruited into armed groups are girls, yet they make up only a tiny
percentage of those put through formal demobilisation programmes. Girls are
recruited for a whole range of purposes: as fighters, as porters, as cooks –
and as sex slaves. Whatever role they perform, it is almost impossible to
escape sexual abuse.
Innocent, 15, was abducted by rebels four years ago. At first, they used her
as a porter, carrying water and weapons. “But then they took us to their
camp,” she says, her eyes cast down with shame. “There wasn’t any girl who
wasn’t taken like that. It was a terrible solidarity we had…” Later
Genereuse Zave, the director of the girls’ hostel where Innocent is staying,
shows me some of the drawings that she and others have done in an art
therapy session. The pictures are bloody with red ink and dotted with images
of open, screaming mouths: a woman howling as a knife is plunged into her
side; another with tears streaming down her face as an angry man forces
himself between her legs.
Sylvie was abducted during the same fighting, at the age of eight. She spent
the next two and a half years as a porter and a cook, living with the older
girls and watching them being taken, one by one, to become slaves or “wives”
to fighters, before fleeing on a trip to town with a commander’s wife. Now
12, Sylvie says she escaped abuse, but adds that her worst fear is that her
school friends and neighbours find out about her past. She knows what their
assumptions would be. A boy may be branded a bandit, but a girl who has been
with the rebels would be branded for life as a fallen woman, never able to
marry.
Pierot is sitting in a minibus now, bouncing along the pitted red roads that
lead south to his old home in North Kivu. He looks anxious as he glances out
of the window. “I don’t know how my parents think any more, so I can’t have
any particular hopes,” he says. “It has been a long time.” Six years. Even
close to the house, he fails to recognise the roads and houses. “I think I
have forgotten it all.” And then he is walking past the neighbours’ houses,
towards a small hut that is suddenly familiar. A girl looks out, leans back
and shouts, and a tiny shape comes cannoning out of the doorway and into
Pierot’s arms. It is his mother, Kavira. “It’s you, it’s you,” she sobs.
“Thank you, thank you, for bringing him home.” Home is not how Pierot left
it. There are three small children he does not know, born since he has been
gone. His mother twitters around him as his father just beams and the other
children look on, slightly dazed.
“He’s so big, he’s so big. He was so little last time I saw him,” Kavira says,
clasping his shoulder. She unearths a picture taken of him two years before
he left, tiny on the back of a wooden scooter. “His face is just the same,
he’s just so much bigger,” she giggles. There is no money for a special
welcome since her emergency Caesarean some months earlier; they are still
paying the debt. “But we will do everything we can to show him how happy we
are that he’s back.” The following weeks and months will be critical – for
both parties.
“The family expect to find the child just as they were at the moment they
left,” Christian Michaud, child protection consultant to Save the Children,
says. “But they find they have changed, they have had violent experiences,
sexual experiences. It’s a different person that returns.” For the child who
has fended for himself for so long, the reunion may soon become
claustrophobic. “They are damaged. They haven’t developed the skills to live
in a family. At the slightest thing, an argument, a disagreement, they may
leave.” For the moment, Pierot is not going anywhere, holding his little
sister on his lap like one who has not been touched with tenderness in all
of six years. And then out of the fields bursts a fireball of energy.
“Pierot!” it shouts and wraps arms around him. It is his older brother,
Kayundo, just returned from school, running all the way to see his long-lost
baby brother. The two cling to each other like burs in the bright sunshine.
In the darkness of the safe house on the outskirts of Goma, Janvier and Moses
weigh up their uncertain future. It is four days since they arrived here,
having met each other in the jungle as they both fled Nkunda’s camp. Four
days since they were holding weapons. Four days since they went out to kill.
Moses managed to escape once before, earlier this year, but returned to his
village only to be recaptured within weeks by the rebel forces. “It’s a
vicious circle,” says Jean de Dieu Muhindo. “We demand the kids, they give
them, then the conflict starts up and they are re-recruited.”
Janvier has more than re-recruitment to fear at home. And yet he seems unmoved
by the danger that his neighbours might seek vengeance for the child who
died at his hands. “They were told he was killed at the front,” he says
blankly. “They don’t know I shot him. Nobody knows. The children never saw
my face, so they didn’t know it was me who shot them. So I don’t feel
responsible for their deaths.” It is a strange rationalisation, that of a
much younger child – or a horribly traumatised one.
“When you look them in the eyes, they are not like children,” Genereuse Zave
says of the children she rescues. “They have seen and done terrible things.”
Moses seems more childlike than scarily grown-up right now. “Sometimes I
dream I killed someone,” he says. “Then I wake up and I can’t close my eyes
again.” Now and again, he looks up to check Janvier has not strayed too far
outside the house.
He and Janvier are bound for life. Two days ago, as they fled through the
forest together, Janvier confided to Moses the terrible secret of how his
neighbour’s son really died. “I told him myself,” Janvier said. “He is the
only one who knows. He will keep the secret because I am his friend.” Moses
shared secrets with Janvier, but those he will not disclose. An exchange of
secrets. A pact in which each of them must trust if they are ever to go
home. A terrible solidarity indeed.
For information on the rehabilitation of child soldiers in Congo, visit www.savethechildren.org
. All names have been changed
