One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [71]
There was no more essential image of war in Africa in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries than that of the little boy clutching a machine gun taller than himself. Currently, 40 percent of armed groups around the world use child soldiers. Twenty percent use child soldiers under ten years old. In Sierra Leone child soldiers, hopped up on a mixture of heroin and gunpowder, cut off the limbs of civilians, sometimes their own families, sometimes other children. In Colombia, children executed their peers for infractions such as falling asleep on duty. In Gaza, terrorists packed children with explosives and compelled them to turn their bodies into “holy shrapnel.” Many families took great pride in their child martyrs. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, commanders forced new child recruits to take part in the ritualized cannibalization of prisoners to complete their indoctrination. This is what I knew about child soldiers: violence, blood, and terror. And here was one such little boy sitting with me, taking great care of his drawing. He took his time selecting colors: reds, pinks, and oranges.
The boy’s name was Musa, and he came from the Ituri district of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Somehow, he found his way to Bukavu through the jungle. High up the hill in one of the poorest districts of the poor city, we sat at a table in the back of a small house belonging to a charitable organization that aided demobilized child soldiers. The house was crumbling. Rather, the hill on which the house sat was crumbling, falling out from underneath the building. Mudslides were common in this neighborhood, and they took a little more of the buildings with them each time. In order to enter the structure, we had to leap up to the first step. I imagined in a few weeks time, a few more weeks of rain, this leap would not even be possible. Yet the children at the center and the adults working there laughed at their building that was sliding off the hill. They had survived worse, I imagine. They laughed, though they wondered where the children would go when the building met its final flood and in a neat somersault, tumbled over itself down the hill, crashing through the battered city to the lake.
Musa told me he was fifteen, as Paul told me, as they all told me. I sighed, sure he could not be fifteen, and jotted down in quotation marks “15?” I had spoken with two other child soldiers that day, both of whom said they were fifteen. I had spoken with a few the day before. All of them fifteen years old, most of them looking younger. I was beginning to tire. Their stories left me drained, getting to know them was becoming emotionally difficult for me, as I knew I would have to leave them and would probably never speak to them again. The stories themselves were hard to listen to.
There were soldiers just down the road from the center, maybe one hundred yards away, and they were always watching, making notes on who went in and who came out. If they wanted, they could snatch a child back into the army as soon as he got home, or they could make sure he was harassed or threatened until he rejoined. One of the most pernicious aspects of the use of child soldiers is that, in the drawn-out conflicts in which they tend to be used, the cycle of violence continues and, unless they are carefully monitored in the long term, the children are regularly re-recruited into the army, caught and punished for escaping, or even recruited into the opposing side.
In defense perhaps from getting to know Musa too well, I began to plug in assumptions about the boy based on what I had heard from the others and what I read in my research, rather than listen to another tale of terror and cruelty transforming a