Sunday June 5, 2005
The Observer

'They made me kill.' Emmanuele looked at the ground as he fumbled with the tassels on his coat. 'If I refused to go to the front line they beat me. They treated me like an animal.'
Emmanuele was 15 when he joined a rebel army group in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The decision was his own. 'I had no money and they said they would give me some,' he said. Other children were taken by force. Serge was at school when a group arrived, firing shots in the air and setting fire to the building. 'I was afraid but I had to go.' He was taken to an army base in Bunia, in the largest town in the Ituri region of the country, where he was put to work on a roadblock.

Serge was then eight. 'I remember holding a gun and shooting,' he said, dropping his voice. 'When it stopped all I could see was bodies on the ground. I knew it must be me who had killed them.' Racked by guilt and missing home Serge cried all the time. He desperately wanted to leave but did not know how.

Eventually he was released and taken to a Save the Children camp in the city of Goma, where he now waits to be reunited with his parents.

It has been two years since the conflict, known as Africa's world war, was officially declared over, but the violence has yet to stop. So far it has claimed more than three million lives.

While hostility has undoubtedly lessened, militias associated with various groups continue to roam the forests and towns. Over the years they have raped, murdered and kidnapped. Boys and girls, still in primary school, have been snatched to bolster their forces. Others as young as seven volunteered to join either the government militia or rebel army groups, desperate to escape their wretched poverty.

Emmanuele and Serge are among about 30,000 child soldiers in the country, 12,500 of them girls. It is common to see children in camouflage uniforms on the roads, with one - or several - weapons slung across their shoulders.

The plight of these forgotten children of conflict will be thrust into the public consciousness again by Bob Geldof's Live8 concerts and when thousands demonstrate at the G8 summit in Scotland next month. Long-term aid to help these children return to their communities and rebuild their lives will be among their demands.

Indeed, the report of the Commission of Africa, signed by Geldof, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown among others, has already highlighted the fact that in African conflicts it is women and children who suffer most, 'recruited - often by force - as combatants, porters or "wives" for male combatants.'

And in the Democratic Republic of Congo groups such as Save the Children and the United Nations children's agency Unicef have been informally trying to release child fighters since 1999.

After the establishment of a transitional government in 2003 these efforts became increasingly co-ordinated. A year ago a national programme for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reinsertion (DDR) was adopted and thousands of children began to return home. During the past 12 months, Save the Children has demobilised 2,500 child soldiers. Unicef has helped nearly 3,000.

In Goma, by the border with Rwanda, six girls aged between 13 and 17 were sitting on rotting mattresses. Aimerance, 17, wore a lacy top, her long hair in a ponytail. She was breast-feeding her son. Next to her, 13-year-old Furaa was holding her newborn daughter.

All six had been taken from army groups where each had fought on the front line. 'If I refused to fight they beat me,' said Zoe, 17. Zaina, also 17, added: 'When I made a mistake or shot a bullet for no reason, I was whipped with a rope with a knot in it.' Each girl had a different reason for joining up. Zaina said she fled her family home after her father found out she had had sex. 'I thought he would kill me,' she said.

Vumilla went after the war left her an orphan. The others talked about the promise of food and clothes, things that were scarce at home. 'In the army they gave us body oil, clothes and money,' said Zaina. 'We don't get that now.'

Penninah Mathenge, a Save the Children health manager based in the eastern Masisi region, said it was common for poverty to drive children to take up arms. 'When they join the army they are given $15, food and a uniform,' she said.

The country is one of the richest in the world for natural resources, packed with copper, gold and diamonds. Next to the jagged roads, the beautiful Congolese countryside is awash with lush growth, a patchwork quilt of brown and green fields crammed with millet, bean plants and banana palms.

Yet child after child talked about how hunger and desperation led them to become soldiers. It is a poverty that, perversely, is being driven by the country's natural wealth. Instead of being used to feed and clothe the population, it is traded for arms by the militias which recruit the child soldiers. Most of the wealth is exported to countries across the world, including Britain.

This process is made possible by corruption. 'We call it the resource curse,' said Patrick Alley, director of the Global Witness campaign group. 'Through colonial times and up to today the Congo has been a repository for resources, with no one giving a damn about the people.'

In a graphic demonstration of this, another group, Human Rights Watch, reported last week that gold in the north-east of the country was fuelling atrocities, with armed groups using its profits to fund their activities and buy weapons. This lure of resources together with ethnic divisions have combined to cause the the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

And as well as driving millions of people into ever deeper poverty and turning children into killers, the battle has led to girls being seized to become 'wives' for male combatants.

Furaa became a wife after joining an armed group. She was no older than 11. 'It was the first time I knew a man,' she said, adding that she also learnt to fight: 'As I was a sub-officer when they gave me orders to go in front as a soldier, I couldn't ignore them. In one battle they shot me. I found the people in the army group very bad.'

Furaa was eventually sent to a Unicef transit camp in Goma where she is waiting to return to her community. Reintegrating the children into normal life is difficult. Some people find it hard to accept the return of a girl who has been raped.

'They say rape is a weapon of war,' said Mathenge. When a woman is raped, tradition dictates that her husband must leave her. 'He has no one to cook for him and he has to find a new wife.'

As the girls spoke a white van pulled into the camp . Inside were 14 uniformed boys, all recently demobilised. They had been in one of the myriad rebel groups or the government militia; some had no idea who they had been fighting for.

Cikuru Bishikwabo, the camp's psychologist, said such children fear for their future - 'what has happened to their families and village. Being a child soldier destroys the mind. Their language becomes aggressive. They lose the ability to negotiate.'

Later 90 more boys, all former soldiers, turned up in Goma. They were extremely hostile. On arrival, one stole mattresses from a camp and took them to town to sell.

Aid workers say that once a child has been taught to kill it is extremely difficult to remove the violent mentality. In some transit camps girls and boys are kept apart because it is feared the boys will have been taught to rape.

It is the potential for the young to be turned into 'killing machines' that makes them prized by the armies. 'Children are seen as having no fear,' said Dedo Nortey, programme director for Save the Children in neighbouring Rwanda, who works with the Rwandan children sent home from the fighting. 'They follow orders and are easily brainwashed.'

Many of the children admitted they carried out atrocities, killing friends and neighbours when told to do so. Often, as a result, their communities did not want them back.

In the camp, Serge was still waiting to return to his village. 'I thought I would go straight home but I spent Christmas and then new year here,' he said. Staff said his father did not want him back.

It is feared that Serge and others like him could become street children. 'Children taken out of the army have ended up on the streets,' said Captain Pascal Kaboy, a logistics officer. 'No one is taking care of them now. That is dangerous because a child who has been used to using a gun can kill people if he does not get what he wants.'

Aid workers, however, insist that they want to overturn a popular idea that it is all right for a child to take up arms and fight.

Marion Turmine, programme director for Save the Children in the country's eastern region, said: 'We need to work with the community to change their mentality - to say that children have the right to play and the right to go to school. To get the children to accept that "I am a child and not a soldier". Reintegration is difficult but I believe it is possible.'

Turmine's team is helping children to reintegrate by setting up projects that provide vocational training. Emmanuele, for instance, is doing a course in masonry. 'I am happy because I am training and will be able to look after my wife,' he said.

And it is not only for former soldiers. They also help other children who have been affected by the war, either through rape or displacement.

Hawa was 13 when three soldiers raped her outside her home. It was another five months before she realised she was pregnant. Now, at 15, with a small child she is finding life difficult: 'I remember I used to go to school,' she said. Hawa has been given two goats and she is being taught to rear them. 'Now I know if I need to I can sell a goat and help my daughter if she becomes sick.'

While the children in the Congo are beginning to receive the aid they desperately need, campaigners in the UK want to ensure the money does not stop too soon.

The Commission of Africa's report warned that half of all countries emerging from conflict relapse into violence within five years. Without decade-long aid for countries which have suffered conflict the former soldiers - now young adults - may return to conflict and in turn recruit a new generation of child warriors.

The names of all the former child soldiers have been changed.

Congo: the roots of bloody conflict

Congo, once the personal fiefdom of King Leopold of Belgium, has been wracked by problems since independence. The popular new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was arrested and murdered soon after independence, reportedly with US and Belgian complicity. Within four years - in 1965 - Joseph Mobutu would launch a coup d'etat and rename the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko. It would mark the beginning of a looting, remarkable even by Africa's standards, with Mobutu securing a personal fortune of $4 billion.

His time in power was marked by brutality and vast economic incompetence as well as theft. By the mid-1990s his power was waning and by 1997 Tutsi and other anti-Mobutu rebels, aided by Rwanda, captured the capital Kinshasa. Zaire was renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo with Laurent-Desire Kabila as President.

War continued with six African countries involved in fighting for control of the Congo's valuable resources. While a peace deal was signed in 1999, Kabila, who had done little to improve his country's lot, was assassinated in 2001.

Despite a UN plan to see the pull-out of foreign troops after a conflict that had killed 2.5 million people and a series of peace deals, the violence continued, particularly in eastern Congo. This month a new constitution was agreed by all the warring factions.