02 04 14 IRIN – Growing up in war – the DRC's child soldiers

Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN

“I stole my first gun, when I was 10. It was a flintlock. By the time I
became a captain at 14, I had many guns. I led 50 people, both children
and adults. There were about 30 children in the unit. The youngest was
10,” Muamba, now 17, told IRIN.

When IRIN met him at one of the “half-way houses” for former child
soldiers in the town of Kiwanja in Rutshuru Territory, Muamba was
enjoying his first month of “comfort” in a basic brick and mortar house
after a decade of bush living.

“I am still angry with my uncle. Those 10 years feel like a waste of a
life,” he said. “It was very difficult. There was no school. I had only
completed two years of schooling [before being forced into child
soldiering].”

The “half-way house” – which provides counselling, parental tracing
services and tutoring in preparation for a return to school – is run by
mother-of-nine Afiya Rehema*. Her own children are aged 7-19 and in the
past nine years she has cared for more than 50 former child soldiers.

“At the moment there are children from Mai-Mai Nyatura, FDLR [Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda] and PARECO [Alliance
of Resistant Congolese Patriots] staying here. When they arrive some
can be disrespectful, but they soon become like other children. There
has never been any violence towards me,” she said. “Only one ever stole,
and then left.”

“I do get some financial support [from local NGO Union pour la paix et
la promotion des droits de l'enfant au Congo (UPDECO)]. But I do this as
a parent. Maybe one of my kids will be taken by an army. And if that
happens I hope another parent will be there to look after my child [if
he/she escapes from an armed group].

Muamba spent his first few years as his uncle’s bodyguard before being
enlisted into PARECO, which emerged in 2007 from a variety of diverse
North Kivu communities, including Hunde, Hutu, Nande, Nyanga, and Tembo.

With a barely discernable pencil moustache indicating the onset of
adulthood, he knows exactly how many battles he has fought and replies
without hesitation: “It was 45, but I don’t know how many people I
killed… The youngest was a girl about six. She was shooting at me.”

Muamba was wounded twice during his decade as a child soldier.

“The first battle I fought in was against the FDLR [an anti-Rwandan
armed group that had an informal alliance with PARECO]. I fought against
ADF-Nalu [Allied Democratic Forces – an Islamist armed group opposed to the neighbouring Ugandan government] in Beni, and M23 [23 March Movement, an alleged Rwandan proxy armed group].

In the end, it was his rank and a chance meeting with members of a local
child activist NGO that allowed him to walk away from soldiering.

“As a captain, I was free to go where ever I wanted. By chance in
Lubero, I met people from UPDECO. They told me they could give me
demobilization papers and then I could leave PARECO forever,” he said.

A girl sergeant’s testimony

Eshe Makemba*, 17, rose to the rank of sergeant in the FDLR, but enjoyed
no such freedom of movement. Being “discriminated” against for being a
Congolese national by the FDLR’s Rwandan officers prompted her
desertion, she says. “I could not speak out as they told me Congolese
were no good.”

After seven years as a soldier for the armed group she ran for two days
through the forest evading a search party, which she says would have
executed her had she been caught.

She was 10 when she and four other girls were kidnapped near Kisharo, in
Rutshuru Territory, by the FDLR. She was the youngest of the captives
and the only one to survive a river crossing shortly after her
abduction. She then did three months of military training.

“I stole and killed people for nothing… killing people was my way of
saving my life,” she told IRIN. She was involved in operations against
Ntabo Ntaberi Sheka’s Ndumba Defence of Congo (NDC) and M23. At other
times she was raiding farms and homesteads.

Four months after her escape and dressed in her only set of clothes, the
former child soldier said she did not think about her time with the
FDLR, but acknowledged that the gun she carried gave her access to
“material [plundered goods].”

“I felt OK after the battle. I enjoyed the battle because I knew that
afterwards there would be clothes, money and food,” Makemba said.

“One day I was with a group [of FDLR soldiers] that raped a woman. But I
did nothing. I did not fear being raped as I had a gun and I could
defend myself. But I could not do anything to stop the rape [of the
woman],” she said.

Call for effective prosecutions

An October 2013 report by the UN Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) entitled Child Recruitment by Armed Groups in DRC From January 2012 to August 2013, said
in the past five years about 10,000 children had been separated from
armed groups, but in the period under review nearly a 1,000 more were
recruited and the use of children by more than 25 armed groups remained
“systemic”.

Three armed groups, the FDLR, Nyatura and M23 accounted for about half of the child recruitment in the review period.

The International Criminal Court’s 2012 conviction of Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) militia leader Thomas Lubanga for
conscripting child soldiers in northeastern DRC’s Ituri region between
2002 and 2003 “is important, because it sends a strong signal that those
who recruit and use children will be held accountable,” Richard Clarke,
director of London-based NGO Child Soldiers International, told IRIN.

“But it needs to be complemented with effective investigations and
prosecutions at the national level in order to address impunity for
these crimes,” he said.

Clarke said other strategies to prevent the practice included “clear
military orders” prohibiting recruitment of children; “strengthening
recruitment procedures through the development of age verification
methods; training members of the armed forces on child rights and child
protection principles; establishing child protection structures inside
the military [and] allowing child protection agencies to visit military
sites to verify that no children have been unlawfully enlisted.”

Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN

This boy was recruited at seven-years-old and spent 10 years as a child soldier

Patrice Munga*, a civil society activist based in Tongo, in Rutshuru
Territory, told IRIN the FDLR recently began recruiting “really young
[under 15] children”.

He said the FDLR were not forcing the children into its ranks, but
conducting “sensitization” at schools in the village “telling them the
FDLR is good,” and about 20 volunteered for the armed group between
November and December 2013.

He said the boys returned after a few weeks to Tongo with AK-47 assault
rifles. He saw one of the child soldiers “showing other children [in the
village] how to use his gun and an FARDC soldier walked by them and
said ‘So you are a soldier too.’”

Zeka Kabongo*, 13, has the body size of a seven-year-old. During the
interview he constantly brushes the wooden arm of a chair, his legs
curled beneath him.

Abducted with three other boys at noon in Lubero by four gunmen he spent
two years as a bodyguard to Kise, the secretary to General Kakule
Sikula Lafontaine’s Union des Patriotes Congolais pour la Paix (UPCP).

Kabongo said Lafontaine “told us we were fighting for our part of the country, which the government was refusing to give us.”

He says he “only killed one person” during his time with the armed group
and that was during a raid on a homestead by five of the UPCP’s
children in search of food.

“We entered the home and asked the wife where her husband was. But the
wife would not say. So we got together and decided to kill her [with
knives]. When we got back to the group we told Lafontaine what we had
done. He told us we ‘had done a good thing’.”

*Not their real names