One Day the Soldiers Came (22 page)

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.

In my time at various recruiting centers, I never saw, let alone talked to, a demobilized girl, though I had seen one in uniform, still serving in the army, at the border when I entered the RCD territory and another at a checkpoint where I was stopped. Worldwide, from Colombia to Sri Lanka, there is near-total denial that girls serve in combat as more than “bush wives” and that they have unique needs that need to be addressed when the fighting stops. Of the 130,000 combatants processed by CONADER (Commission Nationale de Désarmement, Demobilisation et Réisertion), the national institution in charge of disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration in
the Congo, only 2,000 females have participated in their programs.

All indications suggest that, despite the establishment of more and more international norms against using child soldiers, the practice continues and spreads. The use of child soldiers in West Africa spread from Liberia to Sierra Leone to Guinea to Ivory Coast. In the Great Lakes region it has spread through Rwanda, the DRC, Central African Republic, Angola, Kenya, Uganda, up to Sudan, down through Zimbabwe and into Congo Brazzaville. And this trend is not isolated to Africa. In the twentieth century, child soldiers have been used on every continent except Antarctica. Right now there are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers around the globe, and given the continual flare-ups in violence in the Middle East, that estimate is no doubt low.

To fight this trend, several resolutions have been passed and non-governmental organizations have been working with state armies, rebel groups, and militias to make them aware of the harmful effects of child soldier use and the norms of international law protecting children. Passing laws and sensitizing commanders to children’s rights is hardly a solution. The militias know they are operating outside the legal and moral fold. Often, they make their money in the illegal trade in drugs, diamonds, or other natural resources. Often they exist solely
to
make money from these illegal trades. They also know that no one is capable of enforcing any law against them, because, in the regions where they use the young soldiers, they are the law. As Dr. Singer says, “You cannot shame the shameless.”

In March 2004, a mentally handicapped sixteen-year-old Palestinian was arrested in the West Bank town of Nablus as he was about to blow himself up at a checkpoint. He was, no doubt, coerced into that attempted attack. In Sri Lanka in 1996,
the Tamil Tigers sent hundreds of children in attacking waves to overrun the Multavi military complex. Out of a defending force of 1,240 government soldiers, the attackers (children in concert with adult units) killed 1,173 people and took the base. In Afghanistan, the first combat casualty inflicted on U.S. forces came in January 2002, from the gun of a fourteen-year-old sniper. The United States has detained at least six Afghan and Iraqi insurgents under the age of sixteen. There is no count of how many children Coalition forces have engaged in battle and killed.

Children can be a real threat in combat, one that is unavoidable on the modern battlefield. They think less about consequences; they act more rashly than adults, are less risk averse, and because they are children, can cause confusion and hesitation in the enemy. They are also cheap to train and easy to replace; thus, commanders can use them recklessly, as distractions, as forward attack units, as attacking waves to overrun enemy positions or send them in to combat zones to do the most dangerous work.

In Karbala, Iraq, during the 101st Airborne divisions assault in the spring of 2003, two embedded reporters recounted incidents that illustrate the tactical challenges and the confusion that children create on the battlefield. During the firefight for the city, according to Mathew Cox, of the
Army Times
, Pfc. Nick Boggs, of Bravo company was in position on a rooftop with an excellent view of the city. All day, the company had come under heavy attack from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. From this vantage point, the twenty one-year-old from Petersburg, Alaska, saw an Iraqi man sprinting for cover. The man held an RPG under his arm. From the rooftop, the American forces opened fire and the man was taken down. An instant later, two boys “no older than ten” darted from an alleyway. They went to the fallen man. The Fedayeen
often sent children into battle to retrieve weapons and those weapons were used to kill American soldiers. Pfc. Boggs had the kids in his sights.

“I didn’t shoot. I didn’t shoot,” the soldier said. When the kids reached down to retrieve the weapon, Nick Boggs had no choice. He fired his own weapon and, when the smoke cleared, both boys lay in the street, dead.

In another incident on the same day,
U.S. News
correspondent Julian Barnes reports that, during the fighting, Sgt. Jason Sypherd and Sgt. Troy Hanner watched as two boys raced out to retrieve an RPG from a fallen soldier. Sypherd shouted to his unit that it was kids in the street. He yelled for them not to pick up the weapons. Then he fired warning shots to which the boys, well trained, did not react. They reached for the weapon, and both Sypherd and Hanner fired, killing one boy and sending the other running away. A moment later, Jason Sypherd threw up. He was twenty-four years old and had just killed a child.

In both cases (which, because of the chaos, could have been the same incident reported differently), the soldiers involved hesitated in combat when faced with children on the battlefield. They had not been adequately prepared to deal with facing young children in the enemy forces. After the fighting, the soldiers involved were demoralized and depressed. “I keep trying to think of something else,” Sypherd told Barnes. “But I can only think of that boy. War is a bitch.”

Though they can be skilled and fierce fighters, disciplined
or ruthless, child soldiers are still children who will, if they survive, become adults. For youth who have grown up only knowing war, it is believed that violence will be a way of life. Child soldiers will have missed most of their education; they will lack
many life skills. If they are not reintegrated into society, given a reason for hope, given opportunities for the future, it will be all too easy for them to return to violence, whether in the service of a militia, a criminal gang, or on their own as freelance bandits. Looking at the spread of violence throughout West Africa after the Liberian civil war, one can see what happens if the former child soldiers are not given other opportunities. Young fighters from Liberia and Sierra Leone have destabilized the whole region, spilling across borders to take part in other wars. West African child soldiers have been found as far away as the Congo. The question of what to do for child soldiers when a war ends is critical, not just for the child’s well-being, but for the security of the entire region.

In many contexts, former child soldiers are feared by the adults to whom the youths return. Like most adults, they believe that children who have committed terrible acts will have internalized violent behavior as normal. They have been in a terrible war (for wars that use children are by that very fact terrible) and have done unspeakable things, and therefore, it is believed, will be tainted and distorted by violence. They will have become the violence they have inflicted on others and will live in a moral vacuum. I cannot count the number of times in reading the literature on child soldiers that I have read the phrase “moral vacuum.” I have written it myself countless times.

This view, however, does not take into account the fact that children who are forced to fight do not usually have a choice. Or rather, they have an impossible choice. Many of the young soldiers I met had a strong moral sense—Paul for example. He recognized that some actions were “bad”—looting and killing civilians for example. The incidents of nightmares and social problems among former child soldiers is evidence of the moral struggle going on inside them.

After Xavier finished painting the picture of his battle for me, I asked if he ever thought about it when he wasn’t being interviewed by some white guy. He looked at me and laughed. “Yes, sometimes,” he said. He told me that he still had nightmares about his time in the army. “All the suffering,” he said. He kept picking at the splinter on the table. “I have bad dreams about the things I’ve done.”

He did not want to tell me what he’d done, but I could imagine. He told me he was nervous that women would see him and punish him for “the bad things that I’ve done to women.” He leaned back when he said that, no longer picking at the splinter. He crossed his arms again, but this time said nothing else. He was not eager to continue this line of conversation. It seems that Xavier had been a rapist.

It is not that Xavier lacked moral discernment. He had very much internalized the moral repertoire of his society in which murder was wrong, elders should be respected, and those who have been wronged in life exert a force on their violators even after death. He referred to both the translator and myself as sir. He, like Paul, showed great regard for the other children in the demobilization center.

He believed in a moral code that did not spontaneously appear in him after he got out of the army, just as Johnny and Luther Htoo believed in the Christian moral code even as they waged their guerilla war in Burma and took hostages in Thailand. Xavier, the Htoo boys, Paul, and countless other child soldiers simply did not have access to life choices that reflected the moral sense they had.

Xavier would have been murdered himself if he had not carried out the wishes of his commanders. Paul had no love of violence, even though he was sent to the front over and over again. He had to kill because the situation demanded it of him. It is
not the internal realm of a child soldier’s psychology that turns to a “moral vacuum,” it is real circumstances around him that necessitate violating his fledgling moral sense. Looking at all those photographs of child soldiers that run in papers whenever violence flares up on the African continent, it isn’t the children that upset me. It is what their use as soldiers suggests about the world of adults surrounding them that is so unsettling.

Child soldiers are seen as such a great threat to society in part because they undermine accepted roles for children. In war, an armed child holds power over the civilian adults. This throws off any sort of comfortable power dynamic. I learned this lesson firsthand one rainy day.

I had just left the center where I met Musa and Xavier and Paul. My translator and I drove near a market that I had been told to avoid, the one where many of the street children in Bukavu lived. It was in a bad part of town, they said. I wondered, foolishly, what made one part of town in an impoverished war zone worse than another part. I was looking out the window at the women selling nuts and the boys ambling past the car with their goats when I noticed we had stopped. I turned to ask why we had stopped, and that was when I saw the soldiers.

The car was surrounded by five soldiers. Only two of them looked like adults. The oldest, a wiry man with a mustache and mirrored sunglasses, stood next to the driver’s side window and spoke in a firm voice. I have no idea what he said. The driver, Philippe, handed him his papers, which the commander did not want. He spoke angrily and Philippe responded. They stared at each other in silence, and I felt a lot of eyes on me. The soldier next to my window had a baby face and a handgun. He wore a beret on his head, and his uniform hung off his shoulders. It was far too large for him. I guessed he was sixteen. He caught me looking at his handgun, and I quickly looked away. Philippe
and the officer started talking again, and this time there was anger. Philippe kept his hands on the steering wheel. My hands were in my lap. I thought about my bag, with all the names and notes. A lot of people might have trouble if these guys got hold of my notes. The commander was yelling at Philippe, who, for some reason, was yelling back. Without warning, the commander snapped at the young man next to me, who opened the car door. For a moment I wondered if he would drag me out.

He got in.

Philippe looked at him a while and then turned back to the commander and spoke very quickly. There was a rapid back and forth. The other kids around the car, all of them with Kalashnikov rifles, had their fingers on the trigger, but they were not yet pointing them at us. In frustration, the commander waved his arm and turned away. The youths raised their weapons, pointing them at us. There was a small crowd in the market watching this. Their presence helped me relax. Surely they wouldn’t gun us down in the middle of the city, in the middle of a crowd, I told myself.

Philippe turned to the boy in the car. They had a brief exchange. After the longest minute of my life, the commander came back and yelled at Philippe some more. Philippe responded calmly and gestured at the market. The commander stood in silence again and then, as quickly as the incident began, it ended. The boy got out of the car, and they waved us forward, through their checkpoint and on with our day. I asked Philippe what had happened.

“Congolese people,” he said. He shook his head and laughed, though it really wasn’t very funny. “Everybody wants to steal the money.”

They wanted to rob us. The commander used the children under his command to intimidate me. When he really wanted us
afraid, he turned away and left us under the control of the children. It was only for a moment and there was a crowd around, but it was terrifying nonetheless. Had we been somewhere more remote, our escape might not have been so easy. The boy got in the car, Philippe later told me, to direct us to another place to go to continue the discussion.