Pawns

Genocide

     Around 2009 while living in Cape Town I met a gentleman named Mdalaga Habhonima from Burundi, a small country bordering the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the east. He was twenty-seven years old, the youngest of four children, physically small with a scar on his upper lip that for some reason distinguished him. He described to me a story of war and strife in Burundi mainly between the three main ethnic groups, the Twa, the Hutu and the Tutsi (in the past we referred to them as tribes). Mdalaga and his family were Tutsi. For some time, there had been unrest between these groups and in 1992 Burundi had descended into civil war with the Hutu committing genocide against the wealthier Tutsi minority. This would be the second and most severe wave of genocide in Burundi. The first included atrocities against the Hutu by the Tutsi. This second wave saw atrocities against the Tutsi by Hutu people and spread to include the Tutsi people living in Rwanda. During this time both of his parents were killed but fortunately he and his siblings escaped across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo also referred to as the DR Congo. He was five years old.      There he survived for a time in a refugee camp but the camp would become overburdened with food and medicine shortages, gangs and crime. Living conditions were excruciating and insufferable. One day when he was around seven years old he and his brothers were kidnapped from the refugee camp and taken to a camp run by rebel soldiers in the jungles of the DR Congo and forced to work for them. He told me that there were quite a few boys living in the camp who had been kidnapped and forced into labor and that the work was hard and the days long for them to be so young. The soldiers watched them constantly with the reprisals for insubordination and attempted escape severe.      The idea in the camp was for the boys to eventually join the rebels and the fighting when they became old enough but for now their job was to carry ammunition, food and other supplies to the fighters near the front lines. The children were organized into groups of about thirty and they were all very young, about five to eleven years old. The loads they had to carry to the fighters at the front were very heavy. The trip took the entire day with them walking all the way back to their camp. When they returned at night they were exhausted.      They made the trip every two or three days and he described the path they had to walk as long, uneven and rocky in some places with the route heavily secured. There was this one span of road however where the security lapsed but the jungle was so dense and uncertain the trek through it was thought to be impossible. Not only that, they were told that if they tried to escape they would be sent back to the front lines and the fighters there would execute them.

      Even so, there were still a few cases of children trying to escape. The most recent had been a group of four boys, the oldest of whom was eleven who had tried to escape before. The rebels told them that the first time you try to escape you would receive a warning and your lip would be cut to identify you as a risk. The lip on the eleven-year old had already been cut. For him there would be no more warnings. On a trip back to the front lines Mdalaga saw them execute him. The remaining three boys then had their lips cut. There would be no more warnings for them as well.

Familarize yourself with this image in case we fail to negotiate solutions for our problems. It is a long road. This could be us. 

     You would think one warning to be enough but the conditions they endured were so bad some of them actually would try again. Mdalaga saw another group try to escape. This time it was a halfhearted attempt with the boys losing their courage too soon after they had begun. They immediately ran back to the group and tried to mix back in with the rest of the young captives. Unfortunate for Mdalaga, he was identified as one of the attempted escapees and as fate would have it the rebels cut Mdalaga’s lip as they had done the other attempted escapees.
      Eleven was an important age for the boys who carried those supplies to the front lines because it would be soon after that you were viewed as a prospective fighter and were expected to join them in the DR Congo's insurgency. Mdalaga had been eleven for about four months. It was 1998 and the Democratic Republic of the Congo was itself descending into what was called the Second Congo War.

      Then one day it came without warning. The boys were carrying supplies to the fighters on the front and they were walking along the path with the dense jungle a short run to their left. There were about five of them. Suddenly and for some reason Mdalaga’s fear of the dark dense jungle and reprisals were outweighed by the fear of the rebel camp ahead and a future, fighting in a foreign country for something he knew nothing about. 

     Lions were nothing. Hyenas, wild pigs, snakes and dogs were nothing. They unexpectedly burst into a run for the densest part where the soldiers couldn’t follow their small bodies. They ran until it seemed that their lungs would burst. They trekked through the jungle for at least two weeks clinging together, remembering the bits of survival information they had been told by boys who had attempted to escape before. They did this until they eventually made it back to a camp near the one they had come from years before. 
     Mdalaga only stayed in the camp a short time before making his way to a refugee agency and eventually to where I met him. It was eleven-thirty at night and I was on my way home to Lansdowne, a suburb forty-five minutes away. It was the last train out of the Cape Town station and I listened to his story in a dim yellow light amid the sound a train with a light load makes against the tracks. The scar on his upper lip was blatant and would distinguish Mdalaga anywhere in Africa. He was still young at twenty-seven … I wondered what he would do with the rest of his life.

     In retrospect he described the situation like this: It was the belief amongst the refugees that the insurgency in his country was deliberate but not for the reasons he and they expected. The insurgency that led to the exodus into the DR Congo and the refugee camps were deliberate and a mask for a greater event. 

Where refugees were held before being assigned to a camp. Migration is a long arduous road. Not all migrants are lucky. (all images of migration and refugee situations are via courtesy of various international news organizations and individuals)

      It is not so hard to imagine how a conflict in one setting causes an exodus to a second venue which then taxes that neighbor’s resources and social structure to the breaking point. Then imagine that in that venue there exists the variant called precious minerals which are necessary for every lap top, every cell phone, tablet, flat screen TV and computer in the world. The DR Congo is the only known source of such precious minerals in such amalgamation and abundance anywhere on earth. Consider that the untapped precious mineral ores of the Congo have an estimated value equal to the Gross Domestic Product of both Europe and the United States.      How desirable would it be to control these minerals and consider what one might do to access them? Mdalaga described his entire country as a pawn used to divide, access and then control these resources in a neighboring country. It has left him and scores of his countrymen and women morally and intellectually depleted, not to mention he and those scores were impoverished and now without a homeland.      This is a luckless story for Mdagala and for all of us. Its greatest value could only be in a new paradigm – an ethical one powerful enough to not only defend against our fears and errors but hold to our hopes and aspirations. Such ideas were discussed long ago in the Torah, the Koran, the Bible as they were in the principles of Buddhism and other faiths. That ethical principles are the same idea that has threaded its way through all of these faiths should very simply tell us something more.      Such a paradigm is pointed to in my book; “Potent Enterprise” the revised, 2nd edition. What we must consider … and how it can happen is discussed at length in my book “RoadWindows”. What’s so different about my books is that the theme remains non-threatening to the present variables. The wealthy and powerful amongst us have nothing to fear with this elevation of the human spirit and position. Believe it is so and see why and how we should aspire to an ethical paradigm. A description of “Potent Enterprise” and “RoadWindows” is available on  leslielox.com.
By Leslie T. Lox, Thank you for visiting Potential, please tell your friends about what we do.

The Pawns