Two weeks ago the SPLA held a perfunctory ceremony retiring him and a handful of campmates from active duty. Abraham handed over his weapon with visible reluctance. “I will do whatever the SPLA tells me to do,” he told NEWSWEEK. “But if they tell me to go away without my gun, I don’t know what I will do, how I will eat.”
The Rumbek demobilization camp is an unprecedented joint effort by UNICEF and the rebels to start getting the underage troops off the battlefield. The 300-or-so boys here represent only a tiny fraction of the total problem. The SPLA’s estimated 100,000 fighters, mostly Christians and animists from the south, include between 6,000 and 10,000 boy soldiers. That doesn’t count the thousands of child conscripts serving on Khartoum’s side. But Rumbek is at least a first step. The SPLA’s leaders are trying to present a more humane face to the world, hoping to rally international support to their cause. The question is whether these kids can ever fit back into civilian life.
None of them remembers a time without war. Most were turned into soldiers against their will. Many can’t even read or write. Instead they have been taught to shoot fleeing villagers in the back, to condone rape and the wanton murder of civilians. “They are inarticulate, ignorant, afraid,” says Jens Edgar Matthes, the head of UNICEF’s demobilizaion effort. “It’s a whole generation lost to the war.”
NEWSWEEK visited Rumbek recently to meet the boys living there. Few of them seem prepared to disarm–not even those who say they hate the war. “There is nothing good about fighting,” says Angelo Bentiu, 15. He was 10 when an SPLA press gang abducted him and his older brother. After a month of basic training they were ordered into combat against the northern-held town of Mankien, in southern Sudan. “I had to bury my brother in that battle,” says Angelo. Mankien was also where he killed his first man, an Arab who was running away. “I shot him in the back,” the boy says with an unapologetic smile. The grin fades as he adds: “It’s not good for a child to fight. Children don’t know how to fight.”
Rumbek’s challenge is to teach them to live in peace. Education is the heart of the effort, but proper schoolroom behavior is an utterly alien idea to many of the boys. “They have become a menace,” says Napoleon Adok Guy, 27, a former SPLA child soldier and a driving force behind the UNICEF program. “The headmaster is a hostage. They run the school, and he can’t punish them. They threaten to blow his head off.” Some kids don’t go to school. “I have to work in people’s gardens to get fed,” says Santino Kwal, 16. “School is good for children who have a home to leave in the morning and to return to in the evening, not for me.” He has been with the SPLA since he was 10.
He was an old man compared with some of his campmates. Madeng must have been about 4 the night the SPLA raided his home village and killed his father. A couple of years later, the boy says, he was captured by murhaleen, Arab marauders from the north, who sold him into slavery. Eventually he escaped and found his way back across the desert to an SPLA camp. The rebels became his only family. He cooked and cleaned for them; they fed and sheltered him and gave him the rank of line corporal. Four years ago he led a group of boys in standing off a murhaleen raid. “The men had gone to the front, and we were left to defend the camp,” says Madeng. “I was commanding my 12 boys. We killed a lot of murhaleen, and none of us got killed.” His campmates listen quietly to his story. None of the boy combat veterans utters a word of contradiction.
Santino Ngor, 16, insists boys make the best soldiers. “Children can fight better than adults,” he says. “They don’t fear death.” He joined the SPLA at 10, thirsting for revenge against the pro-Khartoum raiders who killed most of his family. He was seriously wounded in battle two years ago, and he’s still recovering. He says he does not intend to stay at Rumbek. “When my leg heals, I will fight again,” he promises. He admits he feels a twinge of regret. “I myself would not mind going to school,” he says. “But if I go, who will kill the Arabs?” The children’s war is anything but over.
