Congo war may pit U.N. troops vs. child soldiers

[MORTARDUDE]

Congo war may pit U.N. troops vs. child soldiers
As more peacekeepers move in, they will confront brash forces schooled in killing.
By Sudarsan Raghavan
Inquirer Staff Writer


EVELYN HOCKSTEIN / Knight Ridder/Tribune

A young soldier holds two assault rifles in Bunia, Congo, where hundreds of people have died. The two rival militias are made up mostly of child soldiers.


BUNIA, Congo - When he is sitting on a chair, Rene Bahati's thin legs don't reach the ground. His slender fingers look too feeble to pull a trigger. But he says he has killed at least one person for every year he has lived.

Rene Bahati is 10 years old.

"I shot them all," he said in an emotionless voice. "I didn't feel anything."

Rene is growing up in a "family" of beer-drinking, drug-taking thugs who loot houses and rape women for fun. School was a camp where he learned to shoot and stab people. A brutal ethnic war has become his playground, and his favorite toy is a Soviet-made rifle.

Child soldiers have long been fixtures in Africa's lingering civil wars. According to the United Nations, 300,000 children under 18 are fighting in 30 nations, a third of them in sub-Saharan Africa. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, dozens of militias and armies have used juvenile fighters called kadogos - little ones - some of them as young as 8, since 1996, when a rebellion toppled U.S.-backed strongman Mobutu Sese Seko.

Now, for the first time, Rene and others in Congo may face a new, more formidable enemy: U.N. peacekeepers with shoot-to-kill orders.

"It's going to be an issue for the soldiers," said Kristine Peduto, a U.N. child-protection officer in Bunia, the largest city in embattled Ituri province, with a population of about 200,000. "Are we going to shoot these children?"

Yesterday, about 100 French commandos and a small British contingent arrived in Bunia to pave the way for a 1,400-strong peacekeeping force. Its mandate will be to restore order to the city and its environs, the latest region infected by a 41/2-year civil war that has killed more than three million people.

The main obstacles to peace are the rival Hema and Lendu tribal militias vying for control of gold- and diamond-rich Ituri. Both are made up mostly of child soldiers. Neither is likely to disarm voluntarily.

Cheap to hire and easy to mold, children make good, obedient killers. Many are plucked from villages or refugee camps at an age at which they do not know right from wrong.

Others join because of peer pressure, or desperation: Promises of paychecks to send home to their families and food to fill their bellies are common.

"It's a huge problem not just for Ituri, but for all of DRC," said Patricia Tome, a U.N. spokeswoman in Congo's capital, Kinshasa. "It is jeopardizing the future of an entire generation."

In some instances, aid workers say, parents offer a son to a ruling militia in exchange for not paying taxes. Girls are kidnapped to cook, or for the sexual amusement of older soldiers.

Kadogos often are used as guards at checkpoints or to carry their superiors' bags. But in Ituri, where an estimated 50,000 people have been killed since 1999, U.N. aid workers are noticing a disturbing trend: Drugged-up children are being sent to the front lines.

"The fathers are not going. They are sending the kids," Peduto said. "The kids think it's a game. You can give them drugs and a gun, and they become small Rambos."

Armed Hema children and teens are the lords of Bunia. They cruise in stolen pickup trucks mounted with large machine guns, clutching rocket-propelled grenades and beer bottles. They taunted the 700 U.N. peacekeepers who were already there but did nothing to stop them from taking over.

At night, they get drunk, loot houses and rape girls with impunity, U.N. officials say. One recent morning, a child barely 3 feet tall - dressed in baggy fatigues and oversized boots - walked with a general's gait as civilians twice his size gave way to him in the street.

Baraka Asiye says he is 15, but his baby face and shy smile would make him look like a Cub Scout if he didn't have a Kalashnikov rifle strapped across his back and extra cartridges bulging from a chest pocket.

"I don't know how many Lendus I have killed," he said with a smile. "Some of them I shot; others I killed by hand with a knife. Some were younger, others were older."

As he gunned his red motorcycle, he added: "They are the enemy. They are not good people."

His parents, he said, were in neighboring Uganda. Asked why he didn't join them, he said matter-of-factly: "I'm working."

Rene Bahati's parents are closer; they fled to Bunia after ethnic fighting in their village. But the boy has made no effort to find them, nor they him.

"They approve of what I do," Rene said. "They think it's a good idea."

Rene is typical of Bunia's kadogos. His friends urged him to join six months ago. The first day, older soldiers beat him and 10 other children to teach the recruits who was in charge. He wanted to leave, but his friends urged him to stay.

The next day, he learned to shoot, and to slice with a knife. Within a month, he was plied with beer and sent to the front lines. His legs are scarred from walking barefoot in the bush.

The first time he killed someone, an older Lendu soldier, "my body went cold." By his second kill, he said, "nothing happened." He fought in five battles, usually in a drunken haze. When he killed, older soldiers patted him on the back and said, "You are a good kadogo." Then they rewarded him with more bullets.

"Bahati is a good fighter," a soldier in his late teens said at the militia's Bunia headquarters.

Rene, whose last name means "luck" in Swahili, calls the older soldiers "brothers." But he also knows his own power - as a child, he can get away with murdering anyone. In this twisted world, the younger and more volatile you are, the more respect you are given.

"They are afraid of me," he said with pride. "They know I can shoot them anytime. The leaders can blame me, but they can do nothing."

U.N. officials have warned Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots, the Hema militia that controls the town, that using soldiers younger than 15 is a war crime.

In an interview with Lubanga at his headquarters, he insisted most of his troops were adults while acknowledging that there were some as young as 10 - mostly, he said, orphans in the militia's care. He promised to "disarm them shortly." But if the new peacekeepers try to disarm his army, he warned, it "will create an explosion."

U.N. officials say that in fact, child soldiers make up 60 percent of Lubanga's militia, and he has been promising to disarm them for months.

The United Nations' Tome said she hoped Lubanga would not send children to fight the peacekeepers. But if he does, it will be his responsibility, she said.

When asked whether the new peacekeepers would engage child soldiers in battle, Madnodje Mounoubai, another U.N. spokesman, replied: "I imagine so. They're child soldiers, but they are carrying weapons and they are shooting."

Rene is lying low for a while. Under U.N. pressure, Lubanga has ordered the smallest of the kadogos to stay off the streets, shed their uniforms, and put away their guns.

Out of uniform, Rene looks like a normal 10-year-old. Sometimes he smiles, and you catch a glimpse of the child inside.

But that's all it is, a glimpse.

When he is with other children, he said, he "feels superior to them." He doesn't like to play games, not even soccer. School doesn't enter his mind.

In his spare time, he watches war movies. His favorite celluloid heroes are Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"When I grow up," he said, "I want to be a commander."