- The 15-year-old boy bites into a packet of jelly babies
as he tells me how he killed. First there were the mothers, after he'd
raped them. Then their babies. Four of them. The eldest aged three.
-
- He speaks softly, with great precision, about what he
did. Then he wanders off, having thanked me for the sweets, to play marbles
with the other killers.
-
- He is the oldest of 39 boys in this dusty compound. Laughing,
boisterous kids who have seen and exacted horror beyond imagining.
-
- They assemble for a school photo, jostling for position.
A barked order and they suddenly freeze. Attention. Awaiting command, soldiers
again.
-
- Frozen on film, the class of child soldiers who, according
to their teachers, have murdered at least 106 people.
-
- These boys, many recruited at the age of 10 and younger,
are being demobbed. They are part of a Save the Children initiative set
up in the lakeside town of Bukavu in South Kivu, part of the Great Lakes
region of central Africa.
-
- This is the area, eastern Democratic Republic of the
Congo, which has seen continuous fighting for the past five years. It is
where four million people have died - the greatest human toll since the
Second World War - and 10million people have been forced to flee their
homes.
-
- Last month 70 British Army engineers arrived as part
of the international peace effort. Their duty is painfully brief: out by
September 1. Out of a killing place whose scale makes Iraq seem like a
playground war and Liberia a bar-room brawl.
-
- But, for the West, this faraway country the size of Western
Europe is a safe place.
-
- In terms of self-interest, it has none of the reasons
which fired the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan or the wars against Milosevic
and Saddam. There are no terrorists plotting outrage in London or New York.
No weapons of mass destruction, real or imagined.
-
- Uganda and Rwanda, the neighbouring countries which sparked
the conflict over one of the world's richest territories, have withdrawn,
leaving local militias to fight a proxy war for them. And children with
Kalashnikovs run amok.
-
- It is those armed kids who form the front line. They
are the weapons of mass destruction. Anisette Birindwa, the jelly-baby
boy, is one among thousands. In Africa, children kill children in huge
numbers and have done so for years. Many are orphans. Homeless, hungry.
And so they become soldiers, because soldiers have guns and guns guarantee
grabbed food, shelter.
-
- In return, they are sent forward first, their battles
appallingly fierce and bloody because children do not understand the consequences
of their actions. And they are brainwashed.
-
- Modern weapons, light, easy to use, are child's play.
Bang, bang - you're dead. Two kids standing little more than an arm's length
from each other, blowing themselves to pieces.
-
- And so Anisette tells me his story. He was 12 when the
soldiers came.
-
- His home outside Bukavu was destroyed by troops from
Rwanda, or maybe it was the Interahamwe - the escaping army which was responsible
for the murder of 800,000 Tutsis before the new, post-genocidal Rwanda
was formed nine years ago. Or maybe it was "just Tutsis".
-
- Anisette isn't sure because they're all the same to him.
Starving, parentless, he joined the M-40 militia which, he believed, was
fighting for his homeland.
-
- He says he trained as a nurse. But no ordinary nurse.
He was taught magic remedies. His medicine could turn bullets into water
and make his mates invincible. He was a big shot.
-
- He tells me: "One day, we captured two women, the
wives of the Interahamwe, and the commander told me to kill them. Six of
us raped them. Then we stabbed them to death with machetes. It was cheaper
than bullets.
-
- "They begged us to spare them, but we laughed. We
had orders.
-
- "We cut out their hearts to take to the commander.
Their babies were aged three months, a boy; a one-year-old girl; another
boy, two; and the last aged three. We killed them and used their bodies
to make medicine.
-
- I BOILED their feet and arms to grind and put in bottles.
The potion has the power to stop bullets. I burned the meat into ash which
you sprinkle on your body to give extra strength.
-
- "The heads of the children and their mothers we
gave to the commander. We ate the hearts, kidneys and livers."
-
- The comander's nickname was Fokamike. His real name is
Kahasha, he says.
-
- One day, perhaps this man will be tried for war crimes.
One day, perhaps this 15-year- old boy will return to his three younger
brothers and two sisters, and till the fields.
-
- He has been delivered to the demob centre after being
arrested by Rwandan-backed RCD soldiers. The social workers offer his community
a grant to help rebuild their village in the hope this will make him accepted
and stop him returning to war.
-
- So far they have received nearly 1,000 kids. It is a
tiny, relative number.
-
- I see boys with scars on their chests, gouged to ward
off bullets. I listen to one, aged 12, saying how happy he was when he
fired and "the big enemy man flopped".
-
- And then there are the girls. Feza Mateso had her first
period last month and is 13. M-40 soldiers took her away two years ago.
-
- "Mummy pleaded, offering five goats instead,"
she says. "They took the goats as well. They made me the wife of a
commander called Justin. He wanted sex too much. I was afraid, but after
seven months I ran away, stealing a canoe to cross the river south of Bukavu.
-
- "Another commander called Shakale found me and he
started to use me. Then the RCD attacked and I was arrested, taken to Kavumu,
north of the city, and raped and raped. There were five girls there.
-
- "Three men took each of us. They used me up to seven
times a day for two weeks. When I became sick they left me outside the
hospital."
-
- We walk to the lake and she is a child again, her face
mesmerised by its tranquil beauty. She takes off her flip-flops and tries
to catch the little fish nibbling at the edge.
-
- Then she begins to cough, the rattle raking her skinny
body. In Africa they still do not like to speak of HIV/Aids. These girl
soldiers are not tested. It would be an intrusion. But Tarcile Kashale,
Feza's counsellor, looks at me with sadness while the child stumbles round
the corner to cough and cough and cough.
-
- In Goma, the Congo town which saw the influx of one million
Rwandans in 1994, I find Feza's friend Mashuruliko Mgoyi, also 13. She
joined the militia when she was 10. Thenshe was captured by the RCD, whose
commander, Gere Kola, used her as a wife.
-
- "When he didn't use me, he put me in the front line.
The first man I killed was militia. I was told to fire two bullets in the
air and then two at his feet. Then I shot him in the chest.
-
- "I had to do this because they said he had special
powers and a single shot would not kill him. Then I had to cut off his
head, make a fire and burn the body and head separately.
-
- "I was glad they blindfolded the man before I killed
him. He was crying, offering to tell us where his comrades were hiding,
but they said kill him anyway. So I did. Then one day I was sent to fetch
water. A soldier came the other way and ordered me into the long grass,
where he raped me. When he finished, five of his friends had me. I was
left lying there in terrible pain. I could feel the hurt in my womb. It
was like wounds."
-
- She was there three months. Doctors found she was suffering
from a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. Last week they discovered
she also had TB and maybe something worse. But they do not test for that.
-
- DESPITE all this, "Mashy" is happy. She has
just found her father, whom she last saw when she was five years old.
-
- Save the Children had traced him and four of her brothers
and sisters. He told her to stop being a soldier and come to live with
him.
-
- "I will never go back to the army," she says.
"I want to get rid of those dreams. I close my eyes and see bad spirits,
the face of that blindfolded man, the people I killed in battle, many of
them.
-
- "Was I frightened when I was fighting? No, we were
used to bullets and I couldn't be afraid any more. When the shooting stopped,
that's when I was frightened."
-
- Once more, Mashy begins to cough. Hopefully she will
be spared from Aids, but it is a slim chance.
-
- A survey revealed last week that 24.2 per cent of the
population in Shabunda, the area in which she fought, have the disease.
-
- This compares to 2.8 per cent 12 years ago and suggests
that conflict itself is a ravenous breeding ground. Particularly when rape
is used as a weapon to batter the population into submission.
-
- We fly further north to Bunia, epicentre of tragedy.
More than 60,000 have died in the past year. Villages destroyed. Disease
and starvation rife in a land among God's most fertile and beautiful.
-
- Mangoes, bananas, star fruit, avocados the size of a
man's shoes, bulging tomatoes, potatoes, greens, maize grow abundantly.
Long-horned cattle graze the green hills. Tilapia and capitaine teem in
the vast lake.
-
- And, beneath the water, oil. Beneath the land, diamonds
and coltan ( the mineral used in every mobile phone). Beneath those farawayhills,
spreading an area as large as Belgium, gold. The biggest goldfield in the
world.
-
- The cause of so much suffering. The place where arms
dealers and people from afar are making hidden fortunes. Where Rwanda and
Uganda, recipents between them of more than £100million worth of
British government aid, fight their proxy war for profit.
-
- I phone the Department for International Development
and ask why we confer such generosity. Long-term development partnerships
should not be used as levers to make governments behave, I am told.
-
- Britain is Rwanda's largest donor. We like the fact that
its military rulers have "pro-poor" policies. Just like Uganda.
And who knows what that may bring for Britain long-term?
-
- Meanwhile we travel on dirt roads to the Bunia front
line which Uganda and Rwanda helped create. Frenchsoldiers, the majority
of a 1,400-strong fighting force, have secured the town. For now.
-
- But here at the very edge, where you can buy a Kalashnikov
for £12, we find dire warning. Burnt-out villages, the earth carpeted
with spent cartridges, crying families. In Ndele, they are living off mangoes
and little else.
-
- A WOMAN struggles to carry a huge bundle of timber on
her head. She has ripped it from the remains of her home. She will sell
it for 55p.
-
- It is her only crop. After this, nothing. Sixty people
died here three weeks ago in fighting between the rival Hema and Lendu
militia.
-
- For Hema read Rwanda and for Lendu read Uganda. Sometimes
they change sides. Sometimes they fight among themselves. They both rely
on child soldiers, and indirectly our government helps pay them.
-
- Sembo Mateso is 17, the obvious top cat among the 11
boys being demobbed by SC-UK. He misses the ganja his commander Thomas
Lubanga fed them. "Yes, I killed," he says. "I cut off limbs
and ate body parts. We were hungry and we had orders." He and his
friend were arrested and handed over by the French, who found them carrying
a hand grenade and a mobile phone.
-
- At the same time they put Mr Lubanga under house arrest
but allowed him 30 armed bodyguards. For now, he is happy to sit in his
house, using his mobile phone to speak with his concealed army. A man biding
his time until the spotlight fades and the killing begins again.
-
- The United Nations could arrest him. There is evidence
enough of war crimes. Instead it sends a token force and keeps its fingers
crossed. Spectating. After all, who really gives a damn?
-
- There are 20,000 refugees in the two camps. Kids run
laughing towards us, amid the noise of their "gunfire". It is
made by rattling a tin can, stretching its curved base with a string. Mimicking
a fatal sound.
-
- The Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital set up in a warehouse
sees 175 people daily. There is no other functioning medical centre for
a town of 350,000.
-
- There are children whose arms have been cut off. Women
with internal injuries. Young men, soldiers pretending to be civilians,
with bullet wounds. And next door there are the young orphans covered in
scabies, such as three-year- old Patience, who was found, half-dead, under
her mother's corpse.
-
- OTHERS, on the far side of the front line, are left to
their fate. The proxy armies are there. The children with guns, scavenging
and killing and maiming and cannibalising to order.
-
- One, at least, wears the testicles of a UN soldier they
captured, brandishing them as a talisman. Another remembers the taste of
his liver. A third has tied another UN soldier's penis to his wrist. Others
simply stubbed their ganja butts on the mutilated bodies.
-
- And at the airport Major Simon Higgens of 42 Field Squadron
Royal Engineers sweats under his tent and talks about the "citadel
of security" he and his men are creating.
-
- As ever, these British troops are chock-full of confidence.
They have cleared away the filth and human bones and worked miracles on
the woeful runway. They talk of the aid planes that have been under fire,
but prefer to say how sappers can "turn a pigsty into a palace".
-
- "My men know that every shovel they dig into the
ground protects a life," Simon adds. But for how long, and how many
lives?
-
- When George Bush defended the decision to invade Iraq,
he used Rwanda as an example. The Security Council was wrong not to act
there, he said. If it were true for Rwanda, it is doubly true for this
place, where so many millions have died already.
-
- Mr Bush was in Africa a few weeks ago, brimming smiles,
frowning concern. He did not set foot in the Congo.
-
- Two years ago, fresh from intervening in Sierra Leone,
Tony Blair called for international action to save the Congo. Two years
in which Afghanistan and Iraq made the headlines while the dying here went
unheard.
-
- It is now little more than a fortnight before the French
and British pull out, under- equipped Bangladeshis move in and a man with
30 bodyguards bides his time.
-
- A fortnight only in which the likes of Bush and Blair
must push warm words aside to ensure the militias demobilise and the arms
dealers and foreign looters are stopped.
-
- Two weeks to ensure the new power-sharing government
has the international, on-the- ground muscle it needs.
-
- Two weeks in which to bring some light to the desperate,
darkest heart of Africa.
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