DR Congo: From gun toters to brick makers - Two demobilised youths share experiences

Bunia, eastern DRC, 28 April 2006 ­ " I killed several people but can't recall how many they were. I was satisfied that I was killing my common enemies that wiped off my entire family", said Masumbuko Mahati, a demobilised former child soldier of the Lendu community, who at age 15 was playing with guns, rather than being at school. The FNI [Front Nationaliste Intégrationiste] trained me in a group of about 300 boys how to cock and fire before being deployed to the battlefield. Our instructions were to attack UPC [Union des Patriotes Congolais] positions because they did not like us."
Fighting and killing in eastern DRC, even when you are 15 years old, is not a novelty in this troubled part of the country.

The Lendus fought the Hemas who also rightly believed that they were not the ones to bring about the conflict and were just defending themselves. Of the 4.5 million inhabitants, they represent the two main ethnic groups in the district of Ituri.

"As rumours of war and tension started building up all over the District, we the Hemas in Mongwalu sensed great danger from our neighbouring Lendu brothers ... the Lendu FNI militiamen attacked Mongwalu burning down the village and taking several people mostly women hostage... I did my military training for two months in Mandro. In the training, we were taught that our enemies were those carrying weapons", said 22-year old Mukisa Lokana who fought alongside the Hema-dominated Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC).

In March 2006, the leader of UPC, Thomas Lubanga, was arrested and transferred to The Hague to face trial for his role in the conflict in the country.

The brutal tribal war in Ituri, a volatile district the size of the West African state of Sierra Leone and bordering Uganda on the east and Sudan on the north, has left an estimated 50,000 people dead and displaced over 600,000 people. The fighting started in 1999. To the Lendus, the war was about reclaiming their lost lands from the Hemas, while to the latter it was about protecting themselves from advancing Lendus militiamen. While land ownership may be the tip of the iceberg, the chaos in Ituri stems from an intricate mix of absence of rule of law and disenfranchisement, unresolved social issues such as land, history of communal violence, regional instability, battle for the control natural resources, among other things.

Seven years later, the conflict has not ended. It has instead taken a new dimension that has brought the former enemies together to form a coalition under the umbrella of the Mouvement Révolutionaire Congolais (MRC), whose repeated attacks on government troops' and peacekeepers' positions continue to threaten the peace. Some 15,000 combatants including 6,000 children laid down their weapons at the end of the DDR programme in June 2005.

However, amid the chaos, the United Nations and the greater international community are intent on restoring peace and stability to the country, notably through the holding of elections. The international community has invested large amounts of money and human resources.

One of the main investments is the Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration (DDR) programme.

Mahati and Lokana are both currently benefiting from a UNDP-sponsored brick manufacturing project which provides training and income generating activity for some 84 beneficiaries including civilians.

The project is currently being implemented through a local NGO, initiated by the ex-combatants themselves, Association des Démobilisés Amateurs de la Promotion de l'Environnement (ADAPE), and is funded by the Norwegian government as part of its support to peace and reconciliation in the country.

In addition to dropping their guns, the DDR site and the reintegration projects, according to Mukisa and Masumbuko, provided an important forum for reconciliation as ex-combatants from the various factions embraced one another, tried to forget the past and rebuild their lives.

"I met one Lendu ex-militiaman at the DDR site that I had wounded at the battle front and we quickly embraced each other", Mukisa put it smilingly.

Masumbuko said they sometime crack jokes about some of their experiences at the battlefront.

The ex-combatants hope to earn some money when they begin to sell their baked bricks in the coming weeks. They also hope to give a new meaning to their lives.

"We are all brothers and sisters. It makes no sense to continue killing one another. We are happy to become brick manufacturers and to reconstruct, literally, our battered communities", said Masumbuko.

This article is published by the Public Information and Advocacy Unit OCHA­DRC.

For more information, please contact: Yvon Edoumou, Information Officer, edoumou@un.org, Lina Ekomo, Advocacy Officer ekomo@un.org

For more information on the humanitarian crisis in DRC go to: www.rdc-humanitaire.net

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations