The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) added child soldiers to its army as it embraced the forces of former warlords, an international human rights group said on Thursday.
The Central African country has been working to combine forces from a number of rebel groups into the regular army as the newly elected government struggles to gain control of the sprawling state the size of Western Europe after years of fighting and neglect.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said 300 to 500 children, some as young as 13, are serving in the combined army brigades in DRC’s remote North Kivu province. The group said the figures came from local and international child-protection workers, but did not provide the names of the groups.
”The head of the army has given the order that child soldiers need to be demobilised and taken out of the ranks, but despite the order, nothing is happening,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a London-based DRC researcher with Human Rights Watch.
In one instance last month, a brigade commander dragged six children out of the vehicle of child-protection workers, the group said. Three of the children were later taken in by United Nations peacekeepers, but three others are still missing, the group said.
Government officials said they were looking into the charges that children continue to serve, and would not be able to confirm or deny any reports until an investigation finishes.
”We have said there will no longer be children in the army,” said Maurice Kanyama, counsel to DRC’s information minister and a member of the investigating committee. ”For the moment we can’t say yes or no on this. We need to verify it. About the end of next week you can have some conclusions.”
Kemal Saiki, a spokesperson for the UN peacekeeping force in DRC, said the UN had previously identified 267 child combatants in North Kivu, 37 of whom had been demobilised as of last week.
”We know very well that in some units they still have children in the ranks,” Saiki said. ”It’s been a widespread practice and we’re trying to stop it.”
DRC’s North Kivu province has been the scene of sporadic skirmishes since late last year — first as long-time warlord Laurent Nkunda resisted combining his forces with the army, and then as army brigades mounted operations against local armed groups.
The process of identifying and removing child fighters started in January as Nkunda’s forces were mixed in with the regular army.
Meanwhile, children in refugee camps in neighbouring Rwanda have told human rights researchers that recruitment continues from the camps, Van Woudenberg said. She attributed the reluctance to demobilise and the recruitment to a sense of insecurity on the part of the minority Tutsi ethnic group, and to fear that admitting to having used child soldiers could lead to war-crimes charges.
Mineral-rich DRC has known little but dictatorship and war since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.
A peace deal brought multiparty elections last year and the country installed its first democratically elected leader in more than four decades in January. The new government has struggled to gain control of militias loyal to former warlords — even as their leaders have joined the government.
Last month, two days of fighting in the capital between army troops and those loyal to a failed presidential candidate left at least 155 dead. — Sapa-AP