Gunplay Part I

In the eastern Congo, getting child soldiers out of the fight and back with their families is just the beginning. Helping them find peace can take a lifetime.

(Note: This is the first of two parts. The names of children in this story have been changed and their faces obscured to protect them from kidnapping and reprisals.)

EASTERN CONGO - Antoine's scars are more than clues. They are the map of his life -- all 13 years of it. One is a burn; the other is a bullet wound. One led him to war; the other prompted him to find a way out.

"I really suffered as a soldier," Antoine says softly, as he sits on a school bench in the International Rescue Committee (IRC) youth center's stark, dirt floor in eastern Congo. "We were never paid, we never had enough to eat and when we did eat the food was terrible. Everything was bad."

He wears a torn, blue striped shirt, dark pants and plastic sandals. He is small for his age, but energetic and playful. He hugs the IRC staff members as if they were family, because for him that is what they have become as they attempt to roll back the clock on a childhood that was nothing less than a grotesque menagerie of violence.

On the back of his right hand, a spider web of raised dark lines covers a patch of light translucent skin. There is a pebbly two-inch swath on his left forearm. They are always in his sight, reminders of the journey on which he carried a Chinese-made assault rifle at the age of nine.

"I never wanted to hurt or kill anyone," Antoine says. "But when they tell you to shoot ... you do. You don't always know if you hit someone."

Antoine says he never knew his mother and was raised by an aunt until the age of nine -- his turning point.

"Her own son stole something," he says, "but accused me." To punish Antoine, his aunt burned his hand with a branch from the cooking fire.

Antoine ran away into the forest. There, he says, he joined an ethnic militia called the "Hemas" who were, and still are, fighting a protracted and bloody war against a rival ethnic group called the "Lendus." They gave him a little training and then armed him with a rifle almost as tall as he was, the Chinese equivalent of an AK-47.

"I didn't know why I was fighting," Antoine shrugs. "I was just told to do it."

He says he was in several firefights, but learned to control his fear.

"You could be afraid from time to time when there was shooting," he says. "But I decided I wasn't going to be afraid and that if death came, I would accept it."

It is a difficult statement to hear from the mouth of someone so young, but becomes easier to understand the more Antoine speaks.

I ask him about the scar on his forearm. He tells me it's from a member of the same militia. The man was using drugs and became agitated.

"The soldier wanted to kill me." Antoine shakes his head at the memory.

"He shot me here instead," he says, pointing to the scar on his broomstick-thin arm. It was a shot that could have taken off the entire forearm if it hadn't just grazed him.

At that point, he says, he began to think about leaving the militia but thought he had few options. "Even after the shooting I had to stay because it was my only way to survive."

Antoine's story isn't an isolated one -- or even the worst.

At one time, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in the

Since 1998 these conflicts have included a national rebellion, a counter-rebellion, feuding tribal militias and encroaching national armies from Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.

Just last year the Congolese interim government began a program of working with non-profit groups like the IRC to start the long and difficult process of identifying these children of war, demobilizing them and reintegrating them with their families and communities.

So far, the IRC says, they've been involved in at least 800 cases regionwide. About 60 of the children were girls.

It's a nine-step process that can take more than half a year to complete -- and even that doesn't guarantee success.

"It begins with the armed groups identifying the children within their unit," says Andrea De Domenico, the IRC's regional coordinator for part of the eastern Congo. "That doesn't always work because they don't understand why they need to do it. These children are useful to them as fighters, cleaners or in some cases for sex."

Once they're identified, the IRC works with the group to verify that they are indeed children and then takes charge of them, placing them with a local foster family while they begin looking for the child's biological parents.

Although she has four children of her own, Katarina Lokali has at different times taken four child soldiers into her home.

"I consider them as my own children," she says, smiling broadly. "Some would wander home late at night, and I would be considerate but strong with them, like a mother. A child must listen to his mother."

Sometimes, she says, they would confide in her, occasionally showing long suppressed emotions.

She says one boy told her he and his younger brother were kidnapped by the forces of Laurent Kabila and were forced to become soldiers. (Kabila became president of the Congo after overthrowing longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in the late '90s. Kabila was later assassinated and succeeded by his son Joseph.)

"The [younger] brother was killed in a battle," she says, "and the boy told me that they didn't have time to properly bury him. And what he always thinks about is the body of his brother, covered with a little dirt and one of his arms sticking out."

The foster families receive some support from the IRC for taking in the children, but it's usually some kind of barter -- food or tools rather than money.

The support is nominal and families have their own reasons for getting involved. Foster mother Adolphine Biabusi has six of her own children. One of them, 12-year-old Dieu Merci, was taken by Ugandan soldiers but later escaped.

"I accepted these boys into my home," Adolphine says, "because one day they may be in a position to help my own children if they are in need."

While children are in foster homes, the IRC wants to ensure they have structure. They're required to come to the organization's youth center every day. Here they get a meal, go to classes, socialize and play, something that they've rarely been able to do.

Today the boys play foosball on a makeshift setup where the "players" are wooden chisels taped to metal rods with wooden blocks for handles. The ball has been stolen so they use a small rock in its place, which often settles into the corners and out of reach.

Here IRC staff members talk to the children and begin the intricate process of mapping memories and timelines, hoping to reconstruct the path that leads back home.

Some of the children were so young when they were inducted into armed groups that they remember little about their families or communities.

IRC staff member Felix Monga is from the Congo and is the "detective" responsible for physically tracking down the familes.

Armed with a photograph of the child and little information, it's a travel odyssey that can take months. It can be thousands of kilometers by foot and motorcycle, through the jungle or even down the Congo River in a wooden dugout called a "pirogue," made from a hollowed-out Cypress tree.

His longest family trace took four months and covered more than 2,500 kilometers.

"You can't give up," he says. "If you give up you fail the program and you fail the child."

(In part II: Claude, a former child soldier, explains how he is haunted every night by a man he murdered for money. Another, Pascal, tells how he killed to avenge his family. A boy named Paulin is reunited with his parents after spending three years in a militia. And after a promising reunion, 13-year-old Antoine wonders what he'll do after being rejected by his extended family.)

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