One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [26]
At any point there were five armies of other nations fighting, as well as countless local militias, like the Mayi Mayi (which consisted of at least twenty different factions), and the genocidal interhamwe from Rwanda. Rwanda’s legitimate army was fighting the interhamwe in the eastern Congo, as well as Kabila’s government based in Kinshasa, and extracting a wealth of diamonds from the land to finance the war. They also backed the rebel group RCD-Goma, who controlled most of the eastern half of the country.
The war in the Congo was declared over in 2003. Four rebel leaders became vice-presidents. At the time of writing, fighting continues in the east, displacing thousands more people, some of whom had been hopeful that peace might finally come to their country with the end of the war and the first democratic elections since 1960. Azarias Ruberwa, the former head of RCD-Goma and now one of the vice-presidents (and a thwarted presidential hopeful with an army at his beck and call), suspended his party’s participation in the Kinshasa-based government for four days. Ethnic conflict between the Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis) and other ethnic groups has flared, resulting in massacres, widespread human rights abuses, and continued violence. Militias and bandits still terrorize much of the Ituri and North Kivu districts and for many Congolese the war has never ended.
The war in the Congo killed nearly 4 million people as a direct result of violence or, far more commonly, due to malnutrition and disease exacerbated by the conflict. The International Rescue Committee reported that between 1998 and 2004, around 1,200 people died every day because of the war. That death toll is equivalent to three 9/11 terrorist attacks per week.
While young children are the most vulnerable—one in four die before reaching five years old—it is adolescents who are the most susceptible to forced recruitment as soldiers, sexual exploitation, and exploitation of their labor. In short, it is adolescents who are most at risk for violent deaths. With their parents often unable to support them, adolescents in armed conflict are more likely to be sent from home to find work in the cities or to take on the burden of supporting the family themselves. Not yet adults, they are no longer nurtured as children. They have neither the protection of the young nor the rights of the grown.
Keto was happy to show me his self-confidence, his ability to manage for himself during the violence and instability in the Congo and the camp. He figured out how to pay his own school fees and aid in supporting the man who had taken him in. He is a central figure in the economic survival of his caretaker as well as himself. He does not have, nor does he seem to want, a passive role in his well-being. He would like assistance, but he knows how to bargain to get it: telling mzungu researchers his story, for example.
I heard similar stories to Keto’s throughout my time in the Congolese camps in Tanzania.
“One day the soldiers came,” Michael told me. Michael, who was fifteen, fled the Congo almost two years before I met him. He, like Keto, lived near Baraka in the area of Fizi, where he worked with his father running a table in the market. He was extremely well dressed for what I had envisioned an African refugee would look like, especially an orphan. He had on a clean blue Oxford shirt and long khaki pants. He also had sneakers that would be considered nice by any standard, not particularly coated in the thick red dust that covered pretty much everything else, as if he had cleaned them moments before I arrived to meet him. He had indeed done so.
He told me that he was suffering and that he lived on his own with boys his age who had also lost