Ranks of child soldiers swell again in Congo

"It has to do with the scale of the conflict and with the involvement of so many different groups," says Ms. Ironside. "There are not just two groups. There are scores of groups, each with its own constituency, and the central economic drive of survival attracts people to fighting, both adults and children. They are not going to school; they are not eating; and the power associated with being a member of an armed group may allow them to get something they can't get otherwise."

Everyone uses child soldiers

All armed groups make use of child soldiers, says Ironside, but some, such as the FARDC, are demobilizing children, while others, such as the Mai Mai, a militia of Congolese Hutus to which Bahati belonged, draw nearly half their forces from child conscripts.

Many of the young fighters are attracted by the simple yet racist slogans about defending their ethnic community. One of the older soldiers, who is 19 years of age, says he joined the CNDP of Tutsi commander General Nkunda as a young teenager but defected to the Mai Mai militia of General La Fontaine three months ago when he was told that Nkunda's people were killing his own Hutu people.

"We were told that the CNDP were killing a lot of our people, so I left to join the Mai Mai," he says. After being sent to fight "against the Tutsis," he was captured Sept. 9 at Ngunga, and remains in a CNDP prison here in the town of Kitchanga.

One of the captured FARDC officers, Lt. Mapendo Faustin, says he disapproves of recruiting children as soldiers. Of the militias, he says, "They are stupid to recruit young boys. They can't be soldiers. They can't do what is normal for a man to do."

But in a war where every ethnic group is fighting for its very survival, there seems to be no end in sight for child recruitment.

One seventeen-year-old, a wispy thin kid with a baby face who avoids eye contact, joined the Rwandan rebel group FDLR in 2003 at the age of 13. He traveled to Congo to be with his father, who had been a member of the FDLR, the armed group led by Rwandan Hutu extremists who carried out the genocide of 1994 that killed some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda.
But when he arrived, his father fled back to Rwanda, and the teen was forced to become a soldier in his father's place.
"When I was in the refugee camps here in Congo, I knew that the Tutsi is my enemy, and my father told me we have to fight the Tutsi wherever he is," he says.
He was not a porter but a fighter, he says, and in early September, he was sent by his commanders to fight in a battle he couldn't win. On his side, there were two companies of some 200 soldiers commanded by FARDC officers. His enemy, the CNDP, had a battalion of nearly 500.
"I got my weapons and ammo from the government, and then we were told we had to fight the Tutsi," he says.

He grows silent. "Since I have been captured, I feel like the Tutsis are like my parents. They keep me safe. They don't strike us. They feed us and give us clothes." It's much better treatment than he received from the FDLR, he says. In four years, he's never been paid.

As dusk falls in Kitchanga, a town without electricity, the young boys are marched off to the barracks. There, they will spend another night as prisoners of war.

[Editor's note:The original version contained photos and text that identified some of the child soldiers. For their safety, this information has been removed.]

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