One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  One could say their less than ideal conditions forced Johnny and Luther to become soldiers and killers, and this brings up an essential question for me:

  When were safety and stability the norm for young people?

  Why is it essential to childhood development that safety and stability reign? Doesn’t human history show us that war, violence, loss, and upheaval are far more common than peace and prosperity? It is estimated that since 3600 B.C. there have been 14,000 wars, and at least 160 since the end of World War II. Looked at in this light, children who grow up without knowing war would seem to be the exception in history.

  Though forged in violence, Johnny and Luther Htoo have distinct personalities with different goals and values. Which one of them is “healthy”? Luther, who wants the peace of a family life or Johnny, who carries on the fight to liberate his people? Even barring political violence, there are little earthquakes that much of the world’s young must withstand: hunger, poverty, domestic violence, divorce, disease, crime, urban blight, rural isolation, and so on. Not a sunny picture of the world, but a picture that is fairly common. Do all children who grow up in tumultuous situations have developmental problems? Do these realities rob them of childhood?

  It is true that in early childhood, the ability to care for oneself and solve complex problems is not developed, and young children need the support of parents, caretakers, or older children to provide for their needs and shield them from hardship as much as possible. But extending this view into adolescence—middle and late childhood as some researchers call it—might not be helpful in understanding the way these adolescents experience and adapt to political violence, displacement, and loss and may actually harm their ability to cope with these stresses by encouraging passivity and disengagement. For this reason, I decided to focus on adolescents in my travels, roughly children eleven to eighteen years old.

  Anna Freud, perhaps the most influential figure in the field of child psychoanalysis, once said: “Let us try to learn from children all they have to tell us, and let us sort out only later how their ideas fit in with our own.” It is with that statement in mind that I came to this work, hoping to listen and learn who these children of war really are. And there is no better way to begin to learn than through play.

  Sitting on the sidelines after an hour or two of soccer skirmishing with the child soldiers in Bukavu, I began to speak with Paul, the thoughtful boy who had helped me up from the mud and guided me through the rules of the game.

  Paul was about four feet tall, but said he was fifteen years old. It is possible. Due to malnutrition, many children in impoverished and war-torn regions suffer from stunted growth, but another explanation seems likely to me in retrospect. He was not fifteen years old. He was eleven or twelve years old. Lying to me was part of a well-learned strategy for survival.

  Under international law, the minimum age for participation in the armed forces is fifteen. Recruiting children below the age of fifteen is considered a war crime. I believe Paul was instructed that, when asked his age, he should always answer “Fifteen.” He followed these orders because to disobey an order is very dangerous, especially for a child subject to the will of the older commanders. Discipline for insubordinate soldiers is always fierce when there is a war on.

  In Colombia’s rebel movement, FARC, for example, insubordinate child soldiers are tied to a pole or a tree by a length of nylon cord. They are forbidden to speak or be spoken to. According to Human Rights Watch, children can be left tied up like that for weeks or a month, thirsty and hungry and alone. At times, their peers are called on to execute them. They are ordered to beat the restrained child to death with stones or sticks, teaching those who live a hands-on lesson about insubordination. The luckier ones are summarily shot by their commanders.

  But Paul might have maintained he was fifteen for reasons other than fear. In the army, he was clothed and fed. In a land where there is little employment, where the availability of regular schooling is not always guaranteed, having food, shelter, and activities of a kind can seem like a great opportunity for a young person. To stay in the army, you had to be fifteen, so Paul became fifteen in the hopes of having a better life.

  There are not many birth records in the Congo. He may not have known his age at all, and being told he was fifteen was all he needed to believe it. By being fifteen he was part of a group, was given a purpose and accepted, and protected himself from anyone checking to make sure he was following orders. Paul could not be sure what my intentions were in interviewing him, despite what I explained to him, and he was being very cautious. In fact, all of the littlest former child soldiers I met told me they were fifteen. Every single one.

  Paul was living in the center waiting for his family to be located to begin the process of reintegrating him into civilian life. It was uncertain if his family would be found, the caretaker told me, and if they would want him back. Before arriving at the center, he was fighting for the Mayi Mayi in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

  The Mayi Mayi is a name given to a number of militias and local defense forces fighting to push foreign invaders out of the Congo or even out of whatever area a particular militia calls home, though they were often no more than violent groups of local thugs taking what they wanted from the people with the barrel of a gun. Mayi comes from the Swahili word “magi,” which means “water.” Local medicine men would encourage youths to join the post-colonial militias, blessing them so that any bullets fired at them would turn to water. Their chant evolved to Mayi Mayi, and the popularity of this belief spread. The power to turn bullets to water proved not to be within the various commanders’ and warlords’ power, but the name stuck. The Mayi Mayi are notoriously fierce, and their command structure is loose. They are feared and often blamed for a lot of the massacres in the eastern part of the Congo. Most factions are organized along ethnic lines, and their violence is directed toward other ethnic groups whom they see as invaders, specifically the Tutsi from Rwanda and their ethnic counterparts in the Congo.

  When I met Paul in the winter of 2002, the war was still tearing the eastern Congo apart, and the rebel group RCD-Goma controlled much of the region, with the backing of neighboring Rwanda. Two Rwandan soldiers stood about 100 yards down the road from where Paul was staying, watching the children come and go, ready to take some of them back into the army. They passed the hot days using their pickup truck for shade. The threat of a kidnapping raid loomed over the center.

  I told Paul that I would change his name in anything I wrote down so that he could not get in trouble for what he said to me. We could pick his pretend name together, and he could say anything he wanted without being afraid.

  He looked at me with wide brown eyes and an expression of confidence on his face, a smile, because I did not seem to understand anything and he would help clear things up for me.

  “It’s okay. I am a soldier,” he said. “I can’t be afraid.” I think he would be disappointed to learn that I changed his name anyway, as I did for all the children in the interest of their own safety.

  Paul was thoughtful and eager to help the other children.

  “There were twenty children fighting with me. They wanted to escape from the army too, but only five of us decided to try. The others said, ‘If you arrive safe, let us know, so we can escape too.’ I have not been able to send them the message yet.” It was his “yet” that struck me. He had plans to help his peers, which he intended to carry out.

  Paul had been kidnapped into the army; he was not a volunteer, he said. One night, the interhamwe entered his village. The interhamwe, roughly meaning “those who attack together,” were the militia in Rwanda primarily responsible for the killing of nearly 800,000 people in the three months of genocidal fever that swept the country in April 1994. They were police officers and soldiers, farmers and businessmen, teachers and students, nuns and priests and nurses, driven mad by ethnic hatred and manipulated by their leaders. Most of the murders of Tutsis and moderate Hutus who refused
to go along with the killing were committed with machetes and garden hoes. After the war, the interhamwe fled Rwanda into the jungles of the Congo where, still manipulated by the former leaders of the Hutu Power government, they continued to stage attacks against Rwanda, continued to avoid punishment for their crimes, and continued to profit from the resource rich land of the eastern Congo for over ten years.

  In Paul’s village, everyone was sleeping as the interhamwe crept in through the jungle. They burst upon the village, ripping the night open with machine-gun fire. Women and children were roused from their beds. The interhamwe looted food, blankets, and supplies. The village, already poor, lost everything.

  As the village burned and families ran for shelter in the bush, the soldiers discovered Paul. They grabbed him and demanded that he help them carry their spoils. He picked up the food, radios, and cartons of cigarettes that they handed him and followed them into the jungle, away from his village. He never saw his mother or father to say good-bye.

  On his trip through the jungle, he complained that he was very far from home. The soldiers looked at him coldly.

  “You are one of us now, a soldier,” they said. “You cannot go home. Even if you wanted to, they would think you were with us and accuse you of stealing. You are no longer a civilian.”

  During his time in the army, Paul says, he fought for the Mayi Mayi faction led by Colonel Padiri, whose nom de guerre means priest. I could imagine the sermons coming from this “priest” as Paul spoke.

  “We were fighting to liberate the country from Rwanda’s army.” Though the Mayi Mayi and the interhamwe are separate entities, they both have the same goal: the expulsion and downfall of the Rwandan presence in the Congo. The interhamwe must have handed Paul over to the Mayi Mayi so they wouldn’t have to feed him.

  He cannot count the number of times he was sent to the front lines. “I went to Kambegeti, Bulambika, Nyakakala four times, Mubuezu five times, other places. We would fight and run, not take villages. We would shoot at the Tutsi [Rwandan soldiers] and run away.”

  As Jason Stearns, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, told a reporter, “Padiri’s Mayi Mayi were guilty of widespread rape and abuse [against civilians].”

  Paul had clearly adopted the party line about the Rwandans being foreign occupiers, about the Tutsi ethnic group as the enemy, but when I asked him about the cause of the war, he told me it was the fault of the interhamwe, his abductors, because Rwanda fought them here. He seemed to understand the necessity of one group fighting the other, or at least the inevitability of it. He did not really care about the who’s and why’s of the fighting. He wanted only one thing: to go to school.

  “My parents could pay my school fees. They could afford it and I could go back to school. I only went through primary school.”

  Paul wanted to be a student, to return home to his parents, put on the white shirt and blue shorts that schoolboys wear, and study. Many of the child soldiers I met, like Paul, wanted only to study. Two themes dominated the drawings child soldiers made for me: violence and school.

  Their drawings of violence were often detailed and large, with big guns in the pictures, the make of the guns, the texture of the camouflage thoroughly depicted. The pictures of school tended to show less attention to detail (many of the kids had not been to school for a long time), but the children usually told me that they themselves were in the drawings of school, not in the drawings of violence (Figures 2, 3).

  School held a strong allure for most of the children I met; they longed for the classroom the way children in the West tend to long for the playground. There are a variety of reasons for this, but in most cases I imagine it had to do with two major factors: a break from the harsher world outside of school and the belief that through learning they can improve their situation in life. For most children affected by war (indeed for many poorer children not affected by war), life consists of a hard regime of work. One tends the flocks or works to earn money for the family or helps with the cooking and cleaning and carrying water and wood. Out of school, one is exposed to all manner of perils, the same perils that face grown-ups, and one must usually face these perils alone. In school, however, a child can sit and play; can spend time with other children and not have to do any of the labor that comes outside the schoolhouse walls. One’s only job in school is to learn. Children in school socialize; they feel like part of a community, a feeling that is all too scarce during times of war. Socializing in school is an immense privilege for children who have spent most of their days as soldiers or beggars or touts for busses and brothels or as prostitutes. School provides a level of stability that most young people long for and that most young people experiencing war cannot find anywhere else.

  In addition to the benefits of being in school, children want the benefits they believe school will provide. They want to learn skills that will create opportunities; they want knowledge, which they believe will give them choices in life. For children of war, school becomes a pathway out of the present suffering and into the future, a future filled with stability, safety, and prosperity. Unfortunately, school is not a possibility for most children in regions affected by armed conflict. In the Democratic Republic of Congo only about 35 percent of school age children attend school and that percentage is no doubt lower in the war-ravaged east of the country. Paul and other former child soldiers want the future that schooling can give as a way to avoid the future that they know soldiering will give them. From Paul’s point of view, without an education he will have no hope for a future that is any better than his past.

  Paul taught me a great deal about children in situations where violence and hardship are the norm. He showed me that the young have the capacity not only to survive but to act with altruism. In trying to help others escape from the Mayi Mayi, he was exercising a moral will that fails many adults in dangerous situations. He had learned the political rhetoric of his militia and seemingly understood it, yet he could be critical of it, framing it first from the point of view of his commanders, and then, later in our talk, considering the Rwandan position, that they needed to fight the interhamwe.

  I thought about our soccer game again. Paul’s warm consideration for the other players struck me profoundly. I wish I had asked him more about his feelings for the other kids in the center. I can only make assumptions from what I saw when we played, but his sense of the situation of others, whether they were the enemy army or other players fallen in the mud during a game, suggested a possibility I had never before considered: through the crucible of violence and hardship, some children can develop deep moral sensibilities and can flourish as individuals.

  “I regret my time in the army,” he said when I asked him what he would tell the leaders who caused the war if he had the chance. “I would like to say to other children not to join the army. To those who cause war I have nothing to say because I am too young. If I had power….”

  His voice trailed off here, and he looked at the floor. Paul seemed to recognize the sidelining of children’s views and experiences. “I am too young,” he said, but I wondered how that could be possible. Since he had fought in the war, I did not believe he was too young to have an opinion. He had been expressing complex ideas all morning.

  He screwed his forehead in thought, his eyes focused past his shoes, seemingly through the floor at the mud just below the boards. I waited for him to continue. It had started to rain outside, and the drops played the tin roof of the center like a xylophone. I wanted to know what Paul would do if he had power; I wanted him to finish his sentence. Would he get revenge? Would he outlaw war? I thought these answers would tell me a lot about his “psychology.” He looked up and told me his answer in a level voice.

  “Everyone is killing people, dying for nothing.”

  Paul understood the reality of the war in the Congo. He understood it through all the propaganda pumped into him by the army. He didn’t know the nuances of the political scene, the names of the players, or the interests pro
fiting from it, but he understood an essential factor of the war: the reality for most Congolese civilians was that neither the victims nor the killers were fighting for any reason anymore.

  After five years and an estimated four million people dead, the war in the Congo was declared over in the spring of 2003, though sporadic fighting continued in the east and the threat of renewed full-scale war looms. The violence of the war has its own momentum, not so easy to stop with treaties. Even in 2002, when we met, when the end of the war did not seem anywhere in sight, Paul did not want to discuss it much. There was not much point in discussing it, he told me. His worries when we spoke were about school and his future.

  Paul took an active interest in what would happen to him next. He expressed hope for himself if he could go to school, hope that he could have a good life, as a mechanic, he suggested, if he could get out of the center and go to study.

  “There is always work for a mechanic here,” he said. “The roads are bad, cars are always broken.” He smiled because he had seen the car in which I pulled up, a busted up taxi that my translator (who was a cab driver too) borrowed to take me around. When I mentioned our car, he laughed and suggested to the translator that he let him fix it, even though he had not been trained as a mechanic yet.

  I didn’t really know how to think of him at first, this little boy who was quick to laugh and smile, who had fought with one of the most brutal militias in the world, with some of the worst killers of the twentieth century, who called himself a soldier and denied that he could be afraid, and who desperately wanted to leave the life of war and go to school.