Over the years I tried to work through why it was that children’s DDR programs were consistently inadequate in meeting the reintegration needs of children exiting from armed groups. The clearly elaborated international framework was supported by an arsenal of technical guidance, including family reunification, formal and nonformal education, psychosocial support, and vocational skills training. Yet the gap was vast between technical ideals clearly elaborated in guidance documents and the actual experiences of children and the challenges they faced.
Whenever I asked practitioners for their perspectives on this gap, their explanation pointed to the insufficient donor funding of reintegration programs. According to this logic, if there was more funding, and for longer periods, children’s DDR programs would achieve their stated aims. Yet it was also obvious to many practitioners that the underlying socioeconomic conditions in the DRC were so dire in general that the obvious question was: “Reintegration into what?” For children were simply being sent back to the situations of impoverishment and family breakdown that had been conducive to their recruitment in the first place. The struggles of Joseph, Christian, and the hundreds of other young former soldiers whom I met over the years were poignant to witness, but regrettably they were not so different from the struggles of countless other young people throughout the DRC who battled ceaselessly with the daily toils of poverty.
What perhaps made the situation more difficult to confront for the young people who had gone through the DDR program were the unrealistic expectations that had been set up for them. For example, the “meaningful roles and identities as civilians” promised by the internationally elaborated DDR program sought to encourage a life for children in an environment of peace and development. Yet in the Kivus, war had become the way of life—the only one known to young people born after 1993—and daily survival was a challenge for most of the population.
A further weakness of the children’s DDR approach was that it was highly technical, sequenced primarily as a logistical process that could be generically implemented by international child protection actors. Yet, this approach could not be adapted to the highly nuanced and multidimensional experiences of each child. As political scientist Gérard Prunier had earlier discerned, the complexity and rootedness of the “child soldier” phenomenon in the DRC suggested no simple pathway into or out of armed groups: “Young local boys . . . came in droves: massive rural poverty, lack of schooling opportunities, boredom, disgust with Mobutu’s decaying rule, all combined to give [Laurent Kabila] in a few months an army of 10,000 to 15,000 kadogo (‘little ones’). They ranged in age from ten to twenty, with a median age of around fifteen. Many were orphans, their parents having died either from diseases or in the Kivus ethnic wars that had been endemic for the past three years. They looked up to the revolutionary leader as a charismatic father-like figure.”10
Children’s reasons for joining an armed group were highly complex and were contingent upon a wide range of individual life factors, which themselves were in a constant state of flux. While it was well established among practitioners that young people joined armed groups for a wide variety of reasons that included poverty, lack of educational opportunities, unemployment, and loss of family members, the education, skills training, or income-generating projects could not manage to push back the structural forces of poverty and absent services.
Young people clearly articulated how the structures of violence were so overwhelming that all they could do was to discern when mobilization might offer the best possible of a range of poor outcomes. One young man described how he had been recruited to the Mayi-Mayi: “One Sunday—it was either in December 1998 or January 1999—I was in church. The Mayi-Mayi came to recruit us. Before then, I had already considered joining. Life was so difficult, we were forced to transport for the different armed groups, we were beaten by soldiers. There was always so much suffering. I thought that maybe life with the Mayi-Mayi would be better.”11
In a context of such deeply rooted violence, young people I knew believed that the only way to assert themselves was by taking up arms. As one participant in a group discussion explained: “In this état de guerre [state of war] power can only be held by the one who has a weapon.”12 Violence had become internalized in their worldviews as they had known nothing different. As described by one young man in a rural town in South Kivu:
Since 1994, power has been with the military—their weapons are their power. We will do whatever they ask us to. As youth, we feel powerless, we feel bad. If we go to the fields [to cultivate] we have to have money in our pockets so that we can buy our way out if they stop and threaten us. To cross any checkpoint, we have to pay. We can’t even get to Bukavu. This takes away our dignity. We are forced to do things under the threat of guns and knives. Their weapons keep us from moving and prevent us from talking. . . . People should be given power, but here it’s taken from us.13
It became increasingly clear to me that if I was to ever effectively support the protection of young people in the DRC, I would have to understand this “common sense” of violence. I would have to dig deeper into history.
FOUNDING VIOLENCE
History tells a grim story about violence on Congolese lands. The vast geographic expanses of the Congo Free State were first etched out during the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, when it came under the personal rule of Belgian King Leopold II. As Adam Hochschild narrates in King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), the extremely violent methods of conquest during Leopold’s reign were integral to his strategy of territorial domination and control, designed to maximize the exploitation of rubber, ivory, and copper. These foundations of violent, extractive rule established an approach to governance that continues to this day.14
Between 1885 and 1908, an estimated eight to ten million people died as a result of disease, famine, and torture. These atrocities were documented by George Washington Williams, an American journalist who was also a lawyer, minister, and former soldier. Williams had traveled to the Congo in 1890, and what he saw was an outrageous affront to the supposedly humanitarian enterprise that King Leopold II was claiming to lead. In a letter addressed to the king, Williams reports that the Congolese people he met “everywhere complain that their land has been taken from them by force; that the Government is cruel and arbitrary, and declare that they neither love nor respect the Government and its flag. Your Majesty’s Government has sequestered their land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail.”15 Williams goes on to decry the forced labor system, including the subjugation of migrant workers brought from other parts of the continent. He provides a list of abuses that he witnessed firsthand: “Your Majesty’s Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offences, to the chain gang, the like of which cannot be seen in any other Government in the civilized or uncivilized world. Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound; so the prisoner is constantly worried. These poor creatures are frequently beaten with a dried piece of hippopotamus skin, called a ‘chicote,’ and usually the blood flows at every stroke when well laid on.”16 Williams recounts slave-hunting raids, razing of villages, maiming of hands, murder, and acts of cannibalism. These grotesque expressions of violence were later documented by many others, including European and American missionaries.
The knowledge of these atrocities eventually reached Europe, spurring activists to mount what some consider the world’s first global human rights campaign.17 As documented in Hochschild’s history, men such as Edward Morel and Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Association they would establish, labored tirelessly to raise awareness among European leaders about the atrocities under way in the Congo Free State. The great writers of the day joined the cause, including Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain with King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and Arthur Conon Doyle with The Crime of the Congo.
Although