One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [14]
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