One Day the Soldiers Came (20 page)

“My parents died of disease…I was told, when I was young,” he said.

“Where did you live after that?” I asked in an overly official tone.

“With the others…” His voice, which had been lingering near silence since we started talking, faded completely at this point. He did not look at me or the translator, but he did not seem to actively avoid looking at us either. His eyes still drifted.

“Who are the others?”

“The others who worked in the mine with me.”

“You worked in the mines?”

“Yes.”

War was destroying traditional structures in the Congo. My translator explained to me that normally a child whose parents had died would be taken in by others and cared for, but this child had been working in the mines since he was very young. It seems no relatives could take him in or no relatives wanted to, perhaps because his parents had died of AIDS, perhaps because he had developmental problems, perhaps because the burden of one more mouth to feed was simply too much.

When talking about the mine, his attention came to us and he stopped drifting. He focused on me, and, while still having trouble communicating clearly, he was more animated and engaged with the game of questions and answers.

“I was paid 503 Zaire francs.” He smiled. This was barely a
few cents when the country was still Zaire, at least five years before we met, when Lepaix must have been around nine or ten years old. Lepaix told me the mines were very dangerous, though it was good to have work to live and friendship with the other children his age working there.

He talked about the diamond mines more than anything else. He spoke of the hard work, the damp conditions. It worked like this: A boy, the smaller the better, is lowered on a rope to the bottom of a 100-foot hole. The boys need to be small so they can maneuver in the pit. They dig out clumps of dirt and throw the clumps into sacks, which other boys haul up and take to the river, to sort through, looking for diamonds. The boys spend all day at the bottom of the pit. If they have to relieve themselves down there, they do. The men who exploit them, the men who make all the money off these operations, have no interest in the welfare of these boys—young boys, hungry and alone are commonplace in the eastern Congo, their lives are cheap.

“At times, when digging, there would be accidents,” Lepaix said. “There would be a collapse, the dirt falling in, crushing. I have seen others killed this way. The mines were dangerous.”

He smiled a bit, for no clear reason. At the start of the interview, his cheeks were flushed, and his first instinct was to answer every question put to him with a simple, “I don’t know.” By the end of the conversation, he had grown somewhat more spontaneous with his statements, though still quiet.

I asked him where he would go if he could go anywhere in the world. He said he didn’t know. After suggesting a few generic places that he could visualize—the city, the ocean, another country, home, he still said simply, “It doesn’t matter.”

I asked him what he likes about living in the camp, what he liked about where he came from.

He told me that life in the camp, where he lives with a “kind
old man” and goes to school, works, and plays soccer is the same as life in the Congo and in the mines. “There is no difference, though I had friends in Congo.”

He thought about home. Living in exile, he missed the only life he knows. When the war ends, he said he would go back and work in the mines again.

“Where will you live?”

“With my friends. The others. We will be together and take care of each other.”

He had been on his own for a long time. He had learned to go along, to work, to do what he was told. He was the object of a lot of outside forces: the mines, the bosses, the fighting, the refugee agencies. But it was in the mines that he got some satisfaction, it seemed. Working in the mines he had earned a salary, had formed his own bonds of friendship, had survived dangers, perhaps numbed to them. In the camp, he made no plans, formulated no specific ideas, seemed barely aware of his surroundings. His emotional distance protected him, perhaps, from terrible thoughts of the things he has seen, but it also kept him from taking a more active role in his future. He could not have his hopes disappointed, because he did not seem to have any.

Looking back now, I find his situation quite troubling. He survived as if on autopilot, easily submitting himself to exploitation by the mining concerns who knew that they would not have difficulties controlling him. The isolation of this adolescent boy is dangerous. His work in the mines, the sheer number of child laborers in the Congo, and the large number of girls engaged in the sex trade shed some light on the assertion made in a Women’s Commission report that “adolescents’ strengths and potential as contributors to their societies go largely unrecognized and unsupported…while those who seek to do them harm…recognize and utilize their capabilities very well.”

This report,
Untapped Potential
, examined the myriad ways adolescents can and do contribute to the healing and recovery of societies torn apart by armed conflict. It also looked at how few programs supported their potential and how sometimes the design of aid focuses solely on very young children and adults. These sorts of programs alienate adolescents and push them further toward the recruiters, the thugs, and the pimps.

Without systems in place to protect and engage children like Lepaix, vulnerable children and orphans, there is no shortage of unscrupulous adults who are ready to exploit them. Not all children are capable of resisting or escaping to find other choices.

I cannot say I would have the strength or the will of Keto or Patience or any of the kids I met who get up every day and face their confines and dangers with courage and a degree of optimism, who cope with their grief and help others to cope. I can see myself wanting only to be rescued, waiting and knowing that my waiting is hopeless or allowing myself to be used by others because it made things easier. Growing up Jewish, there were, inevitably, times I couldn’t help but imagine how I would have fared in a concentration camp. I wondered how I would have held up to the mental and physical strains of that assaulted life.

Until I met these kids in Africa, scrawny and certainly not in the best of health, I thought I could never have survived such situations alive, let alone with any of my current values intact. But listening to them, I feel I might have learned something. Under strain and stress, one doesn’t necessarily have to vanish, to die mentally or physically. As George Orwell wrote, “…many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty.” Many of the children I met illustrated this perfectly. I
found much in them to admire, much that had been forged by disaster, pain, and a great deal of difficulty.

It is a commitment to themselves, to their families and communities (sometimes despite the abuse inflicted on them by the same), and to the future that brought out the best in the young people I met. Young people are quite capable of making commitments to their communities, their moral sense, or their beliefs and acting on those commitments when they are able. If adults can recognize and encourage this, adolescents, even in the most difficult circumstances, can be valuable forces for good in their communities. Ignored, these same capacities in children can be harnessed by other adults as powerful destructive forces.

Children as Soldiers

T
he former child soldier sitting across the table from me had little hands. They wrapped around the crayon with a delicacy that defied the thoughts I could not shake: those little fingers had pulled the trigger on a Kalashnikov; those little fingers had shot to kill. He wore a jean jacket that was too big for him and his hair was cut close to his head because of a lice problem. It made me think of a U.S. marine.

There was no more essential image of war in Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries than that of the little boy clutching a machine gun taller than himself. Currently, 40 percent of armed groups around the world use child soldiers. Twenty percent use child soldiers under ten years old. In Sierra Leone child soldiers, hopped up on a mixture of heroin and gunpowder, cut off the limbs of civilians, sometimes their own families, sometimes other children. In Colombia, children executed their peers for infractions such as falling asleep on duty. In Gaza, terrorists packed children with explosives and compelled them to turn their bodies into “holy shrapnel.” Many families took great pride in their child martyrs. In the Democratic Re
public of Congo, commanders forced new child recruits to take part in the ritualized cannibalization of prisoners to complete their indoctrination. This is what I knew about child soldiers: violence, blood, and terror. And here was one such little boy sitting with me, taking great care of his drawing. He took his time selecting colors: reds, pinks, and oranges.

The boy’s name was Musa, and he came from the Ituri district of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Somehow, he found his way to Bukavu through the jungle. High up the hill in one of the poorest districts of the poor city, we sat at a table in the back of a small house belonging to a charitable organization that aided demobilized child soldiers. The house was crumbling. Rather, the hill on which the house sat was crumbling, falling out from underneath the building. Mudslides were common in this neighborhood, and they took a little more of the buildings with them each time. In order to enter the structure, we had to leap up to the first step. I imagined in a few weeks time, a few more weeks of rain, this leap would not even be possible. Yet the children at the center and the adults working there laughed at their building that was sliding off the hill. They had survived worse, I imagine. They laughed, though they wondered where the children would go when the building met its final flood and in a neat somersault, tumbled over itself down the hill, crashing through the battered city to the lake.

Musa told me he was fifteen, as Paul told me, as they all told me. I sighed, sure he could not be fifteen, and jotted down in quotation marks “15?” I had spoken with two other child soldiers that day, both of whom said they were fifteen. I had spoken with a few the day before. All of them fifteen years old, most of them looking younger. I was beginning to tire. Their stories left me drained, getting to know them was becoming emotionally difficult for me, as I knew I would have to leave
them and would probably never speak to them again. The stories themselves were hard to listen to.

There were soldiers just down the road from the center, maybe one hundred yards away, and they were always watching, making notes on who went in and who came out. If they wanted, they could snatch a child back into the army as soon as he got home, or they could make sure he was harassed or threatened until he rejoined. One of the most pernicious aspects of the use of child soldiers is that, in the drawn-out conflicts in which they tend to be used, the cycle of violence continues and, unless they are carefully monitored in the long term, the children are regularly re-recruited into the army, caught and punished for escaping, or even recruited into the opposing side.

In defense perhaps from getting to know Musa too well, I began to plug in assumptions about the boy based on what I had heard from the others and what I read in my research, rather than listen to another tale of terror and cruelty transforming a child into a warrior. He had not yet started speaking.

Musa was probably walking home from the market or from school or playing soccer with other boys when a truck drove up beside him. Roads and schools are two of the most common places for children to be abducted. Rebel groups in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Nepal, Indonesia, and terrorist organizations operating out of Pakistan target schools as recruitment centers as a matter of policy. Anywhere that there are a lot of children away from their families, however, is ideal. Orphans are the best, because no one will miss them and they have no hope for themselves anyway. I sighed and assumed Musa was an orphan.

The soldiers in the truck would have forced him to go with them, grabbing him and tossing him in the truck or tricking him by offering him a ride. Then, he would have been taken to
a camp somewhere remote or to an airfield and loaded onto an airplane to take him to a base in the jungle. That’s where they’d train him: first how to march, how to obey orders, how to clean for the adults, how to handle a wooden gun, how to shoot a real one. With the training would come abuse, verbal and physical. Merciless. The cruelty inflicted on him would desensitize him to inflicting cruelty on others. Then they sent him to the front, goaded him on to commit atrocities, to kill and to maim, or they assigned him to the most dangerous jobs, running as a decoy through enemy lines, picking up ammunition off the dead, walking through minefields, spying. Either way, they demanded that he kill, so that he would be baptized in blood. Or they demanded that he rape someone, baptized in sexual power. Maybe he contracted AIDS. As Physicians for Human Rights observed in Sierra Leone, 50 percent of rape victims tested positive for HIV, and male child soldiers were considered the primary transmitters. Perhaps Musa became too sick to keep fighting, so they let him go rather than care for him, or maybe he got tired of the army and, when the commander wasn’t looking, escaped. I steeled myself to hear this story and began with the first question which I was sure would lead to this terrifying and predictable tale.

“Can you tell me, Musa, how you came to be in the army?”

“My friends beat me up and for revenge I joined the army,” he answered without hesitation. “I volunteered because I was angry.”

“You volunteered?”

“I went to the recruiters and they took me in. I joined the army to have power over my friends, but I got no revenge.” He sighed with disappointment, shaking his head at what a foolish child he had been a year ago. “They took us to a training camp at Luama and made us get up early every morning and do
exercises. Then they moved us to Mushaki Base and the commander took me out because I am too young.”

This story did not fit my profile. Not at all. Musa volunteered. He was not kidnapped, not forced to be there at the point of a gun. He
wanted
to be there for some kind of preemptive revenge. He never fought in the bush, though he wanted to. A commander took him out of the army and sent him to an organization that works with former child soldiers. The commanders were supposed to be the bad guys, the children the unwitting victims of manipulation.

“I disliked being in the army and I want to go home,” Musa said. He drew a picture of himself playing soccer and himself sitting in school at the rehabilitation center. He drew a man running from a soldier delivering a stream of bullets into the back of the man’s head (Figure 19).

Musa was growing up in the eastern Congo at a time when societal rules had disintegrated. The
interhamwe
and various armies and militias roamed the land, raping, killing, and looting. The norm for government officials, police officers, and soldiers was (and still is) corruption. It is impossible to know how many violent acts Musa had witnessed in his life or what effect they had on him, but according to his story, in the army he never saw combat. Yet his picture contains some graphic details of violence, resembling the pictures of children who have witnessed such terrors. The drawing could be a product of his imagination or a depiction of things he had heard as easily as it could be an eyewitness account. The point is that the image of a soldier wielding absolute power over a weak civilian was in Musa’s mind. With violence so prevalent in his young life, it makes sense that a feud with his friends, the kind of quarrel children have all the time, would lead him to join the army as an impulsive response to his anger. What he knew about the
world he lived in—that soldiers have the power to get what they want and to act with impunity—led him to believe that being in the army would make sure his peers could not harass him again. His decision to join seemed rational from his point of view.

Not all children are forced into military service. While children’s recruitment cannot exactly be called voluntary, various surveys have found that over half the children fighting in most forces joined under no direct threat of violence. Other factors, such as societal shame, perceived security, poverty, or a lack of job prospects may have made military service the only option in these youth’s minds, but, like Musa, they were not abducted. They went because they wanted to go. They believed that the military would get them what they needed, whether it was power, revenge, money, food, protection, validation, or simply something to do. Recruiters all over the world, from the United States to Myanmar, know this and take advantage of it. In Sri Lanka, playing on youth’s desire for adventure, recruiters will show up at schools with a motorcycle. The glitzy army recruitment commercials on U.S. television during prime time play on the same feeling. Sometimes, armies will take in unaccompanied children, orphans, and migrant workers, telling the youths it is for their protection, they are not forcing them into the army. But the youths rarely stay out of hostilities for long.

This made sense when I thought about some of the unaccompanied minors I met in refugee camps. They did not want to be helpless recipients of aid, they claimed. They wanted to become responsible and productive adults. Keto, for example, wanted very much to prove his own self-sufficiency and competence. I can imagine that, had he not made it to refuge in Tanzania but instead had been brought into the army, he would have “volunteered” to fight so as not to burden his unit, to
prove that he too could contribute. And others, whose wills were not as strong as Keto’s—Lepaix for example—could easily be persuaded to fight alongside the grown-ups.

Some of the exiled Burmese children I had met might have joined armed forces for ideological reasons. I know at least one of them has done so since we met. Children are certainly not without ideology. As Robert Coles discusses in
The Political Life of Children,
politics do get worked into the life of the young. Children integrate ideologies into their views of the world, as evidenced by racist dogmas spouted by young people in South Africa during apartheid or communist doctrines espoused by children involved with the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1970s. In Iraq, children are fighting the U.S.-led forces that they see as occupiers of their homeland. Coalition forces have engaged with soldiers as young as thirteen. As one adolescent boy who fought against U.S. forces in Najaf in 2004 told the London
Daily Telegraph
, “We will kill the unbelievers because faith is the most powerful weapon.”

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.