The Children of War
The former child soldiers of Mozambique's civil war offer insights into morality and human resiliency
That's where the child soldiers came in. The Renamo leaders began recruiting from rural villages, and if they couldn't recruit able-bodied young boys, they simply kidnapped them. Most of the recruits were 12, 13, 14 years old, but some were as young as 6. The youngest boys often served as porters and servants to Renamo officers, or as spies, but most were systematically trained to be soldiers. They were exposed to the noise of rifle blasts, to desensitize them. They were ordered to kill cattle; then, when they got used to that, to kill other humans, often those who ignored orders or tried to escape. The perimeters of the rebels' camps were often littered with the skulls of those who had tried to escape but failed.
It is remarkable, given all of the terrorist indoctrination, that Renamo converted so few of the kids it captured. Perhaps because Renamo stood for nothing, perhaps because its soldiers were so brutal, it appears that most of the child soldiers in its ragtag ranks never stopped thinking of themselves as captives or victims. Some certainly "went Renamo" out of self-preservation, and some even liked their newfound power as warriors, but most kept their minds focused on finding a chance to escape.
Inevitably, given Renamo's obvious lack of soldierly deportment and order, the opportunities eventually presented themselves. Rafael Vicente Saveca's chance came when his camp was switching locations. Rafael was sent by Renamo officers to fetch water. He seized the chance to flee, hiding in huts in friendly villages before finally returning to his village, near Chibuto. To avoid recapture, or worse, Rafael disappeared, wandering for months, until Frelimo soldiers finally detained him in a prisoner-of-war camp.
A lot of Mozambican boys like Rafael had similar experiences. The Renamo camps were heavily policed, but the boys managed to escape during battles or while on missions to gather wood or hunt for food. Then, often, they would vanish into the bush, moving from village to village at night, resting and hiding during the day. The stretch of bush between Maputo and Gaza is pretty desolate even today. Back in the late 1980s it was salted with land mines, almost constantly policed by government and guerrilla troops.
Like Rafael, many of Renamo's child soldiers ended up in Frelimo jails before they were transferred to the Lhanguene orphanage in Maputo. Orphanage, actually, is something of a misnomer. The kids at Lhanguene came from such tightly knit, extended families that their language hardly distinguished between father and uncle, sibling or cousin. With such large families, and such tight bonds among members, the true orphan at Lhanguene was rare. But calling Lhanguene an orphanage had public-relations value for the Frelimo government, because it was a visible reminder of Renamo's brutality toward Mozambique's children. Whatever its significance to the larger world, Lhanguene was a safe haven for the kids lucky enough to find their way there--and the first step on their uncertain journey of healing.
Power of soccer. There were thousands of boys abducted by Renamo and forced to train as soldiers. Some were with the rebel forces just months, others for as long as three years. The person who has treated and studied these kids most intensely is psychologist Neil Boothby. Now a professor of public health at Columbia University, Boothby at the time worked for Save the Children, the international aid organization that works to assist kids around the globe whose lives have been disrupted by war, including the deslocados who ended up at the Lhanguene orphanage.
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