|
Posted on June 9, 2008
Children, the forgotten and invisible
victims of wars! Parents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
continue to go through the pain of seeing their children abducted by armed
forces and have no one to turn to. In
1996, when the Rwandan, Ugandan, and Burundian armies invaded the D.R. Congo,
they forcefully took children hostage and put them on the frontline to help
them take over the county. These innocent human beings, to carry out the
mission of their captors, they were transformed into beasts by taking all that
is humane and turning them into real killing machines. The time to release all the children who are still
fighting in the ranks of different rebel groups in eastern D. R. Congo is past
due. Until every single one who still alive is back
home, we will continue asking their release.
Below is a peach by Murhabazi Namegabe
at Congo Global action
Coalition conference held in Washington DC from March 30-31st, 2008 at the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum. Murhabazi
is the director of the Bureau pour le Volontariat au Service de l’Enfance et de
la Sante (BVES) which promotes
awareness and protection of children who are victims of conflict, economic
marginalization, etc
I would like to
start this speech by thanking Congo Global Action and the honorable Holocaust Memorial Museum
for posing, for the first time, the question of the Congolese genocide of about
5 millions persons, in front of this assembly. I would also say that several
windows of hope have been opened, with the support of the international
community and the participation of the people, but especially, since 2006, with
the process of pacification, reunification and democratization in our country,
the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Because of this
fundamental progress, I declare out loud
that the Democratic Republic of Congo should be on the international list of
successful nations rather than failing ones!
I am coming now
to what happened, for the children of Congo since the wars in 1996. All the forces and all the armed groups have extensively
used children (boys and girls) as soldiers or combatants or even as sexual
slaves. In 2004, the forces and armed groups declared, in Kinshasa, that they have used more than
30,000 children for the war (including 40% girls)! These shameful statistics unfortunately did
not include the children who died on the battlefield, or the thousands of
soldier children or sexual slaves held by foreign armed groups (Rwanda, Uganda,
and Burundi)
currently active in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
|
