One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [74]
In the absence of a strong will to keep children and adolescents out of the army, history proves, they will join. During the American Revolutionary War, children found ways to fight. Hezekiah Packard enlisted at age thirteen after the rebel victory at Bunker Hill. Some boys, prevented from joining because of their age, argued until the recruiters, who had quotas to meet, let them join. During partisan resistance to the Nazi occupation of Poland, Jewish children joined in droves.
The choice was simple: die in a ghetto or concentration camp or go down fighting. The resistance needed these fighters and used them eagerly.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo at the time I visited, no political will existed to stop youth from fighting. All parties to the conflict were actively engaged in recruiting children as soldiers, porters, and sex-slaves, even though the 1999 Lusaka Peace Accords called for the disarmament of child soldiers.
When presented with evidence of minors below fifteen years of age in their ranks at the front lines, the head of the recognized government in Kinshasa’s Department of Foreign Affairs did admit, as Human Rights Watch reported, that they had “inherited” child soldiers recruited by the late President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, for the campaign he waged together with Rwandan forces against the Mobutu government in 1996 and 1997. It took several years for them to begin to demobilize some soldiers, and even though it was largely a cosmetic gesture.
In December 2001, Kinshasa demobilized 3000 of its child soldiers. There was a large event as the children ended their service in the armed forces—UNICEF provided T-shirts. In response, the major rebel party in the east, RCD-Goma, committed to demobilizing 2,600 child soldiers. UNICEF did not send T-shirts. RCD-Goma demobilized only 140 of the 2,600 children. The rest were moved from the Mushaki military base forty kilometers outside the city of Goma to remote locations in the jungles of the Katanga province, far from the eyes of the international community. Could this have been a response to the slight by UNICEF for not delivering T-shirts or was the RCD simply unwilling to let their young recruits go? Some aid workers have indicated that most of these demobilizations are a sham. They only let the weakest or most troublesome young soldiers go. The undesirables. This rings true when one considers that very few girls ever participate in these demobilization events. The commanders want to keep their spoils.
Driving into the area controlled by RCD-Goma in January 2002, I saw an armed border guard who could not have been older than fifteen. A few days later, I saw the boy again and asked my guide, who worked with an NGO trying to get kids out of the army, if this boy was a holdover from before the Lusaka Accords who had yet to be demobilized since the RCD signed and made a commitment to demobilize their child soldiers or if he was a new recruit.
“That is difficult to say,” my guide told me. “I know this boy. He will be fifteen in May. He was a soldier before Lusaka, but he was demobilized in our center, given shelter and food until we could locate his family or place him somewhere. We found his family and he rejoined them. The army took him back a few months ago and he is a soldier again.”
Authorities have acknowledged and sought to justify the continued use of child soldiers. In an interview broadcast on January 24, 2001, on the RCD-Goma’s Radio Goma, journalists asked Commander Obert Rwibasira of the RCD-Goma’s G5 military division why the movement continued to enroll very young recruits. He replied that RCD-Goma needed a “young and dynamic army.”
The Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), which has deployed not only in northern Uganda to fight the guerilla Lord’s Resistance