One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [16]
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