KIMUA, Congo -- The young man had been fighting in the rebel movement
for 11 years when a piece of paper fell from the sky and fluttered down
onto the jungle floor.
When he was sure no one was looking, he picked it up. To his
surprise, he could read it. It was written in Kinyarwanda, the language
30-year-old Elias Sanvura had learned as a boy in neighboring Rwanda.
It asked a simple question: What's keeping you from going home?
Inside this clutch of jungle, thousands of young men who belong to a
rebel army are beginning to ask themselves the same question.
The answer will affect not only their future but that of this giant
nation, which has been brought to the breaking point by almost two
decades of brutal conflict. The nerve center of the conflict is the
rebel army, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or
FDLR, founded by the same men who led the 1994 genocide in neighboring
Rwanda.
The rank and file of this 6,000-strong militia are men under 30, who
are here only because they fear they have no other choice. In a twisted
effort to keep them in the bush, the group's leaders have lied to
recruits by telling them they will be imprisoned if they return to
Rwanda. The young men are cut off from information, have no cell phone
coverage and are not even sure if their parents are alive.
The only way to pierce the bubble of tangled foliage in which the
rebels live is from above. So the U.N. is using helicopters to drop
fliers over the jungle, and just enough are making their way to the
muddy ground. Desertions are on the rise, from 50 a month in 2008 to
more than 100 a month last year.
Each passing week, more and more young men like Sanvura are deciding to take the chance.
--
Sanvura was 15 during the Rwandan genocide, when he escaped to Congo and began a life on the run.
In his hometown of Butare in the south, Hutu extremists had drawn up
lists of their Tutsi neighbors. Hutu teachers identified their Tutsi
students. Doctors checked the IDs of their patients. Priests turned
over their parishioners. The meticulously planned campaign of slaughter
killed more than 500,000 people in less than three months in a place
the size of Maryland.
Sanvura's Hutu family lived on a small plot of land on a hilltop
just outside Butare. They saw the bodies of their Tutsi neighbors pile
up. They did not take part in the killings, he says, but they became
guilty by association because they were Hutu.
So when the slaughter finally ended, they joined 2 million other
Hutus who fled. They streamed across the countryside in a human wave
heading toward Congo. In the confusion, Sanvura became separated from
his parents.
Sanvura's father walked until his legs gave out. He died somewhere in Congo, convulsing on the ground from fever.
His mother lived in Congolese refugee camps for several years. Then she
returned with her other sons to their dirt floor house in Butare.
But her eldest, Sanvura, didn't know any of this. He kept on walking. For months. Possibly a year.
He doesn't remember how long it took to traverse Congo, a
jungle-covered country the size of Europe, before reaching its capital
700 miles later. He made his way to a refugee camp hastily erected for
Hutus like him across the Congo River in the city of Brazzaville.
The years passed and Sanvura kept expecting his parents to walk in.
His voice changed. Even if he could have found a way to telephone his
mother, she would no longer recognize him. By the time he was 19, his
future was a hole.
The day the Hutu militia came to recruit him, he felt relieved.
--
In Congo, the Hutu extremists launched an insurgency from teeming
refugee camps like Sanvura's with the aim of retaking Rwanda. They
organized hit-and-run expeditions into Rwanda, known as "Operation
Insecticide." Their goal was to kill genocide survivors and any Hutus
who might testify against them. They recruited young people from within
the camps.
"I would say that 75 percent of the FDLR are people too young to
have had anything to do with the genocide. Only 25 percent are old
enough to be charged. And not even 1 percent are genocidaires," says
Maj. Gen. Paul Rwarakabije, who was the military chief of the FDLR
until 2003, when he deserted and returned to Rwanda. "But it's this 1
percent that are in control. They are holding the rest hostage."
The FDLR has terrorized Congo. Last year alone, the group is accused of
killing at least 700 civilians, gang-raping women and torching
villages, according to a report released two months ago by U.S.-based
Human Rights Watch.
"If we don't get these people out ... the whole area will continue
to slip into disaster to an extent we cannot even describe," says FDLR
expert Harald Hinkel, who formerly worked for the World Bank on a
program to demobilize the Hutu rebels.
The army gave Sanvura a uniform and a matriculation number. He was
sent back across Congo to a military academy in the eastern jungle, not
far from the Rwandan border.
His commanders said they would soon retake Rwanda - and that those who
helped would get good jobs in the new government. But as the years
passed, the militia was pushed further and further into the overgrown
Congolese bush. Sanvura saw how his superiors made a comfortable life
for themselves by controlling mines or pillaging Congolese villages,
with no real intention of returning to Rwanda.
There's in fact little reason for the senior leaders of the FDLR to
go back to Rwanda. If they do, they will face prosecution for genocide
crimes - unlike their young recruits, who were children at the time and
who are exempt from charges by Rwandan law. Also, it is in the economic
self-interest of the senior leaders to stay in the Congolese bush,
where they benefit from a free workforce, according to Rakiya Omaar, an
FDLR expert