BUJUMBURA: Jean-Noel was 12 years old when Tutsi militiamen scooped him off the street and made him lug heavy ammunition as they fought Hutu rebels on the outskirts of Burundi’s capital.
“It was terrible,” he said, declining to be identified by his full name. “I’d never experienced war before. When you heard shooting all you wanted to do was run away, but if you did, your own guys would shoot you.”
Jean-Noel, now 17, is one of about 3,000 child soldiers demobilised in the central African country since the return of relative peace after 12 years of civil war.
Most have been resettled in their former communities with help from international organisations such as Unicef and a handful of relief charities.
For many of the young recruits who took part in the ethnic conflict that caused 300,000 deaths, the struggle to start new lives is just beginning.
“The biggest problem is just to be accepted as a normal child in society,” said Dieudonne Girukwishaka, head of a programme to help reintegrate child soldiers run by the charity Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development (ACORD).
“There’s a tremendous stigma. Some still fear them, thinking they’ll be delinquents or take up arms again and destabilise the community.”
Rights groups say all parties to Burundi’s violence used children as cheap and expendable tools of war, with many abducted from their families and forced to serve as porters, cooks, informants, sex slaves and combatants.
Others were driven to volunteer as the war pitting rebels from the Hutu majority against the politically dominant Tutsi minority tore Burundi apart, uprooting hundreds of thousands.
“It’s easy to manipulate a child,” Girukwishaka said. “Many child soldiers were recruited (when the war started) in 1993 as many of them were displaced, their parents killed. They were alone and it was easy for someone to say come into the bush with us and fight.”
Last year, Burundi began demobilising child soldiers from all but one of the country’s armed groups, including the national army, civil defence forces and rebel factions.
Only the Forces for National Liberation (FNL), a Hutu rebel group, remains outside the peace process and aid agencies say it still boosts its ranks with children drawn mostly from the poverty-stricken hills around Bujumbura.
In July, Burundi’s now ethnically mixed national army said it had captured about 100 child combatants recruited by the FNL, some as they crossed the border from neighbouring Congo where they had been undergoing training.
Some child soldiers have been even further from home.
One Hutu boy nicknamed Safari was just 11 years old and already an orphan when violence engulfed his neighbourhood on the outskirts of Bujumbura in 1993.
Running for his life, he found himself caught up in a tide of fleeing refugees. Eventually he arrived in south Sudan, where he was recruited by Sudanese rebels waging their own civil war.
For nine years, Safari fought beside them, taking orders from men twice his age who beat him if he put a foot wrong.—Reuters
