Kidnapped by Rebels

Kidnapped by Rebels
Last Friday, after less than a week's training, he was handed a machine gun and ordered to the front line.

The quiet schoolboy yesterday told The Daily Telegraph how he was kidnapped and turned into a soldier by troops loyal to Laurent Nkunda, the rebel leader whose offensive has won him large swathes of territory and forced 250,000 people from their homes.

Thousands more were fleeing again yesterday as government soldiers looted towns north of the rebel-held area as they abandoned their positions.

"It was after school, and my mother asked me to go to buy soap for washing our clothes," Patrick said yesterday in a rehabilitation centre in Goma, eastern Congo's main city.

"The rebels found me on the road and they and ordered me to carry their bags, they said I was not going home anymore, I was going to be a soldier.

"I said I am too young, and I am the only boy in my house and I have to help my mother. But I could do nothing. I have heard that if you refuse them, they just kill you straight away."

He was marched to a rebel base, where there were 'many, many' other children being trained close to a field hospital receiving the injured from last week's fighting between rebels and a pro-government militia group.

At night, as equatorial downpours flooded the hills, he slept in the open under scraps of discarded uniforms. Each day, he was fed only one small bowl of maize-cake.

"We were taught how we should run forward and how to hold the gun, how to shoot at the enemy and not be afraid," he said. The rest of the time, the boys and girls had to carry milk to wounded soldiers.

"There were many of them, some had gunshots in their faces, one had lost his arm. We had to carry the dead people and bury them. When I saw them, I was so afraid because I knew that soon this would be me."

Five days later, last Friday, he was given his gun and ordered to march into the bush towards the fighting.

"I knew that if I went there, I must die, but I knew that if I tried to escape they would shoot me," he said.

Eventually, he plucked the courage to tell his troop commander that he needed the lavatory. Once into the bush, he ran, dropping his rifle and tearing off his uniform as he fled towards the safety of a United Nations military outpost nearby.

He was lucky to escape. Of the 33,000 children forced into Congo's myriad armed groups since its first civil war erupted in 1996, it is estimated that more than 3,000 are still on the battlefields.

The recent surge in fighting, which started in August and intensified in the last fortnight, has raised fears of fresh use of child soldiers by all sides, Save The Children said.

"We are extremely concerned that this is going to increase dramatically cases of new recruitment," said Emma Fanning, the agency's child protection coordinator for Congo.

"It is exceptionally difficult for us to intervene at this point, but it is exactly when it is most tempting for children who have been disarmed to go back to the armed groups, simply to protect themselves and their families."

Patrick is now one of 244 former child soldiers staying at a transit centre in Goma.

"He cannot return to his mother, because the people who took him will find him again," said the centre's director. He refused to be named in order to obscure Patrick's whereabouts.

"We will care for him here, but until there is more effort to stop this war, and to stop the poverty which forces some children into armed groups, I am afraid we will see many more children here like him."
telegraph.co.uk