One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [77]
Suddenly, a barrage of bullets tore through the commander, the one adult among the youngsters. It was fear of this adult that kept them in battle. Without him, Xavier felt no reason to stay in the hell of machine guns blasts and shouting children. With his commander dead, he escaped. He ran away from the bullets and into the mysterious jungle that he had never been in before. He knew only that whatever he found would be better than his chances in the army.
“I have killed many people, I think, but I don’t know. I don’t count. It is better to forget those things. If I could speak to my recruiters now,” he said, “I would tell them to study and learn, not to become soldiers. I suffered very much.”
“What happened to the girls in your unit? You said there were five?” He looked up at me surprised, as if the answer was obvious.
“All of them died,” he said.
Girls are used in the army for a variety of purposes. Michel, a sixteen-year-old at the center who may have actually been sixteen, told me that he and his sister joined the army because their parents were dead and they had no jobs.
“I went to the front line many times and my sister was sent to the enemy to be a spy. Girls were sent to be prostitutes and get information from the enemy. This is how my sister was used. She is still there.”
Michel had seen dozens of battles. He listed the locations of fighting in which he participated against the Mayi Mayi and the interhamwe in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, sites of some of the most intense violence in the war. He drew pictures of weapons and spoke with terrible accuracy about their technical details for such a young person with so little formal schooling.
“This is a Kalashnikov rifle and this is an R4 5.56mm gun and this is a 60mm mortar. This is an RPG.” He pointed each part of his drawing out, and though to me they looked generic enough, in each of them he saw a very specific object with a very specific meaning to him (Figure 20). I was reminded of Keto and his use of terms like repatriation, transit centers, and rationing. Nothing magical about this boy’s use of technical terms for weapons. They were the words that made the world in which he lived.
A Human Rights Watch report on the use of child soldiers in the eastern Congo describes the use of child soldiers at the front lines, and from this I could imagine what Michel had been through, though he did not want to talk about the battles:
[The children] were trained on how to use arms and how to shoot, and that was the end of it. Some of the kids were even sent to battle without arms. They were sent ahead of battle-ready troops of the RCD and RPA to create a diversion. They were ordered to make a lot of noise, using sticks on tree trunks and the like. When they succeeded in diverting the attention of government troops, that is to say when they drew government fire on their unarmed elements, these units, known as the Kadogo Commando, would be literally allowed to fall like flies under government fire. The experienced troops would then attack the government troops when their attention was diverted to the Kadogo Commando.
“During the fighting,” says Michel, “I left the front lines with the commander.” They went to sleep by the roadside on their way back to Mushaki base. Early in the morning, when the first birds were starting to sing, Michel looked around. His commander was still asleep. He stood up, left his uniform behind so he looked like a poor peasant boy, and ran away. He did not have a clean getaway.
The same men who had recruited him into the army recognized him when he arrived in his village again. They demanded that he return to the army. He feared that he would be beaten for trying to escape. The recruiters told him that they were ashamed he was such a coward, that he had made a promise that