| The war that broke out in August 1998 in Congo has been marked by widespread recruitment of child soldiers by both President Kabila's forces and the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie, RCD).
President Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo has used child soldiers to support his military since 1996. As the rebel leader of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL), he recruited thousands of young child soldiers, known as "Kadogo," or "the little ones," to support his military campaign against the Mobutu government. Despite pledges from the Congolese government to demobilize children from the FAC since the end of the
1996-1997 war and the establishment of several fledgling demobilization programs, the Kabila government has continued to recruit children as young as seven years old for military service.48 While no reliable statistics were available regarding the number of child soldiers, the total number is likely to be at least several thousand.
Since the beginning of the conflict on August 2, recruitment of children has increased. An official communique aired on national radio on August 7, 1998 called for children and youth between twelve and twenty years old to enlist in the armed forces, in response to the RCD insurgency. In addition to Kinshasa, recruitment reportedly took place at the airport in Mbuji-Mayi in Western Kasai, and Kamina, Kaniema, and Manono in Katanga. A FAC commander in Kinshasa who had done an informal survey of troops stationed there in November, 1998 found that one out of every fourteen FAC soldiers was under the age of thirteen.
Conditions for child soldiers appeared to be deplorable. Aid groups working in the interior of Congo said that they frequently saw Kabila's young "volunteers" in tattered clothes and in a precarious nutritional state. A doctor of a humanitarian aid agency who had spoken with child soldiers deployed in Bas-Congo, including one only thirteen years old, feared that the child soldiers in this area would fall victim to epidemics.
The rebel army reenlisted about a hundred demobilized child soldiers in early August from a transit center in Bukavu, and another 500 upon taking Kisangani in late August. The transit centers were part of an experimental program which UNICEF ran for former child soldiers in
cooperation with the Congolese authorities. The former child soldiers learned technical skills and followed classes in the centers, prior to their reunification with their families. The RCD continued to recruit children for combat as recently as December 1998. Human Rights Watch interviewed severalboys from a group of new recruits from Bunia and Kisangani that varied in age from fifteen to seventeen. In Bukavu, RCD military had abducted or threatened to abduct children, apparently for use in the army, from several local organizations working with unaccompanied minors. While many other boys were among this group of recruits, the actual number of children recruited into RCD forces is unknown.
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