8-year-olds sent into battle on promise of a square meal

IF TRUTH is the first casualty of war, surely children are the second.

In Rwanda their lot has included unwanted roles as child labourers, boy soldiers, murdered genocide witnesses and rape victims.

Reports coming out of eastern Zaire suggest that children as young as eight have been sent into battle with the promise of a square meal and an immunity to bullets. Those not armed with AK-47s have been sent out by the Interahamwe forces to set landmines in early-morning puddles on the roads of south-western Rwanda.

That other great companion of undisciplined armies - rape - has followed faithfully in the paths of the soldiers. No girl is too young for troops drunk on banana wine and high on bloodlust and hate.

Aid agencies tending to the 600,000 who have returned from eastern Zaire in the past fortnight have had to deal with a new round of atrocities against children to match the genocide two years ago.

A girl of 10 is raped repeatedly by rampaging Zairean soldiers, then mutilated; another is defiled in front of her family, who are then shot. Children who survive one set of marauders are killed by the next set of bandits to show up in their area.

These were the crimes an efficiently-deployed international force might have averted or minimised. Now that the idea of the force is being slowly buried, it is left to the aid agencies to deal with the new layer of human suffering which has resulted.

One of the chief problems is that of unaccompanied children, that is, those who have been orphaned or abandoned, or separated from their parents.

It is reckoned that up to 5,000 of the returning refugees are children who have lost their parents. In a country already full of orphans, the task of minding them was one the Rwandan authorities were happy to pass on to the agencies.

The job is a mixture of baby minding and detective work, as a visit to Concern's centre in Butare shows. Since it was set up in 1994, 1,700 children have come to this former Christian Brothers school. All but 100 have been reunited with their families.

They are children like Thierry. He was found, covered in excrement, a 10-month-old baby crying beside the body of his dead mother during the genocide. Last week, he finally said goodbye to the centre; someone had spotted a likeness to an old woman living a few miles away. She turned out to be his grandmother.

Or Patrick, whose entire family was butchered in the genocide. Or so it was thought. Then one day Josephine, a Catholic nun, came to the centre looking for work and immediately recognised her nephew, for whom she now cares.

Not all stories end so happily. Children have been taken by their supposed families, only to be killed. These "families" had sought out the child as the only witness to their involvement in the genocide.

Other children come from mixed backgrounds, where one side of the family is implicated in the killing of the other. These are understandably reluctant to return to their murderous uncles and aunts.

For these reasons, Concern is reluctant to use photographs of the children when trying to trace parents, or to let possible parents visit the centre. Instead, the children are quizzed on their origins, their family - any information which might give a clue.

Concern staff then visit the child's commune of origin and enlist the help of the local mayor in the search.

Each wave of fighting and fleeing brings a new set of children to the centre, sometimes Hutu, sometimes Tutsi.

The children tend not to make the same ethnic distinctions that some of their parents did, and the very youngest are lucky enough in some cases not to know whether they are Hutu or Tutsi.

"From time to time there are problems, but nothing serious or lasting. The biggest problem is keeping order between the teenage boys and girls but, thankfully, we haven't had any unaccompanied babies yet," says Mr Paul Comiskey, who runs the centre along with his partner, Ms Adrienne Cassidy.

Rwandan families are like sponges, capable of absorbing related children whose parents have died. But even the most generous of relatives are stretched at times to accommodate another mouth to feed when their own family is already large.

For this reason, Concern has established community development projects, for example, to encourage goat-raising. The aim is to increase the general wealth of the community rather than giving rise to welfare dependency.

The older children have set up a co-operative engaged in chicken farming and sewing. Older girls, who have lost their parents, are being helped to build their own houses in return for promising to rear their younger brothers and sisters.

In these ways the family unit, though horrendously sundered during the genocide, is being repaired. At least some children will escape the clutches of the warlords for the relative security of home.