One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London Read Free Book Online

genocidal fever that swept the country in April 1994. They were police officers and soldiers, farmers and businessmen, teachers and students, nuns and priests and nurses, driven mad by ethnic hatred and manipulated by their leaders. Most of the murders of Tutsis and moderate Hutus who refused to go along with the killing were committed with machetes and garden hoes. After the war, the interhamwe fled Rwanda into the jungles of the Congo where, still manipulated by the former leaders of the Hutu Power government, they continued to stage attacks against Rwanda, continued to avoid punishment for their crimes, and continued to profit from the resource rich land of the eastern Congo for over ten years.
    In Paul’s village, everyone was sleeping as the interhamwe crept in through the jungle. They burst upon the village, ripping the night open with machine-gun fire. Women and children were roused from their beds. The interhamwe looted food, blankets, and supplies. The village, already poor, lost everything.
    As the village burned and families ran for shelter in the bush, the soldiers discovered Paul. They grabbed him and demanded that he help them carry their spoils. He picked up the food, radios, and cartons of cigarettes that they handed him and followed them into the jungle, away from his village. He never saw his mother or father to say good-bye.
    On his trip through the jungle, he complained that he was very far from home. The soldiers looked at him coldly.
    “You are one of us now, a soldier,” they said. “You cannot go home. Even if you wanted to, they would think you were with us and accuse you of stealing. You are no longer a civilian.”
    During his time in the army, Paul says, he fought for the Mayi Mayi faction led by Colonel Padiri, whose nom de guerre means priest. I could imagine the sermons coming from this “priest” as Paul spoke.
    “We were fighting to liberate the country from Rwanda’s army.” Though the Mayi Mayi and the interhamwe are separate entities, they both have the same goal: the expulsion and downfall of the Rwandan presence in the Congo. The interhamwe must have handed Paul over to the Mayi Mayi so they wouldn’t have to feed him.
    He cannot count the number of times he was sent to the front lines. “I went to Kambegeti, Bulambika, Nyakakala four times, Mubuezu five times, other places. We would fight and run, not take villages. We would shoot at the Tutsi [Rwandan soldiers] and run away.”
    As Jason Stearns, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, told a reporter, “Padiri’s Mayi Mayi were guilty of widespread rape and abuse [against civilians].”
    Paul had clearly adopted the party line about the Rwandans being foreign occupiers, about the Tutsi ethnic group as the enemy, but when I asked him about the cause of the war, he told me it was the fault of the interhamwe , his abductors, because Rwanda fought them here. He seemed to understand the necessity of one group fighting the other, or at least the inevitability of it. He did not really care about the who’s and why’s of the fighting. He wanted only one thing: to go to school.
    “My parents could pay my school fees. They could affordit and I could go back to school. I only went through primary school.”
    Paul wanted to be a student, to return home to his parents, put on the white shirt and blue shorts that schoolboys wear, and study. Many of the child soldiers I met, like Paul, wanted only to study. Two themes dominated the drawings child soldiers made for me: violence and school.
    Their drawings of violence were often detailed and large, with big guns in the pictures, the make of the guns, the texture of the camouflage thoroughly depicted. The pictures of school tended to show less attention to detail (many of the kids had not been to school for a long time), but the children usually told me that they themselves were in the drawings of school, not in the drawings of violence (Figures 2, 3).
    School held a strong