One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [72]
Musa was probably walking home from the market or from school or playing soccer with other boys when a truck drove up beside him. Roads and schools are two of the most common places for children to be abducted. Rebel groups in Colombia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Congo, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Nepal, Indonesia, and terrorist organizations operating out of Pakistan target schools as recruitment centers as a matter of policy. Anywhere that there are a lot of children away from their families, however, is ideal. Orphans are the best, because no one will miss them and they have no hope for themselves anyway. I sighed and assumed Musa was an orphan.
The soldiers in the truck would have forced him to go with them, grabbing him and tossing him in the truck or tricking him by offering him a ride. Then, he would have been taken to a camp somewhere remote or to an airfield and loaded onto an airplane to take him to a base in the jungle. That’s where they’d train him: first how to march, how to obey orders, how to clean for the adults, how to handle a wooden gun, how to shoot a real one. With the training would come abuse, verbal and physical. Merciless. The cruelty inflicted on him would desensitize him to inflicting cruelty on others. Then they sent him to the front, goaded him on to commit atrocities, to kill and to maim, or they assigned him to the most dangerous jobs, running as a decoy through enemy lines, picking up ammunition off the dead, walking through minefields, spying. Either way, they demanded that he kill, so that he would be baptized in blood. Or they demanded that he rape someone, baptized in sexual power. Maybe he contracted AIDS. As Physicians for Human Rights observed in Sierra Leone, 50 percent of rape victims tested positive for HIV, and male child soldiers were considered the primary transmitters. Perhaps Musa became too sick to keep fighting, so they let him go rather than care for him, or maybe he got tired of the army and, when the commander wasn’t looking, escaped. I steeled myself to hear this story and began with the first question which I was sure would lead to this terrifying and predictable tale.
“Can you tell me, Musa, how you came to be in the army?”
“My friends beat me up and for revenge I joined the army,” he answered without hesitation. “I volunteered because I was angry.”
“You volunteered?”
“I went to the recruiters and they took me in. I joined the army to have power over my friends, but I got no revenge.” He sighed with disappointment, shaking his head at what a foolish child he had been a year ago. “They took us to a training camp at Luama and made us get up early every morning and do exercises. Then they moved us to Mushaki Base and the commander took me out because I am too young.”
This story did not fit my profile. Not at all. Musa volunteered. He was not kidnapped, not forced to be there at the point of a gun. He wanted to be there for some kind of preemptive revenge. He never fought in the bush, though he wanted to. A commander took him out of the army and sent him to an organization that works with former child soldiers. The commanders were supposed to be the bad guys, the children the unwitting victims of manipulation.
“I disliked being in the army and I want to go home,” Musa said. He drew a picture of himself playing soccer and himself sitting in school at the rehabilitation center. He drew a man running from a soldier delivering a stream of bullets into the back of the man’s head (Figure 19).
Musa was growing up in the eastern Congo at a time when societal rules had disintegrated. The interhamwe and various armies and militias roamed the land, raping, killing, and looting. The norm for government officials, police officers, and soldiers was (and still is) corruption. It is impossible to know how many violent acts Musa had witnessed in his life or what effect they had on him, but according to his story, in the army he never saw combat. Yet his picture contains some graphic details of violence, resembling