Free One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London

parent, they have to face the hardships of abandonment, prejudice, and fear. And because of the war, soldiers moving around the country, taking many women, raping or sleeping with prostitutes, AIDS is spreading: a new kind of weapon in wars that are aimed at destroying civilian life. Many children do not have Keto’s good fortune in finding someone to care for him. And many, like him, had to flee not just the fighting, but the stigma of the disease, often more devastating than the soldiers. Communities do not want the burden of an unclean child. A recent trend suggests many of these children in the eastern Congo are being accused of witchcraft and sent away. They often find themselves working as child laborers in mines, benefiting little from the adults who exploit them. They are outcasts, unwanted, unmissed, and their deaths are rarely noticed. Many such children have met their end in the bottom of abandoned diamond pits.
    “In Lugufu, there was a man who knew me and knew that Mom had died. I stayed with him. He made sure I was studying, but I couldn’t afford the school fees for secondary school, so I had to go back to primary school. I started cutting grass and collecting it for people to build with so I could have money to pay for school, so I would be in school one month and out of school the next, working. Then they lowered the fees, so I could go back to school all the time. So that is my story of how I crossed. The journey was hard, but I don’t think I want to go back to Congo. I don’t know that I have anything to go back to.”
    He doesn’t.
    The Democratic Republic of Congo should be a wealthy nation. The ground is rich in gold, copper, diamonds, zinc, and coltan (a mineral used in cell phones). As is the case in many developing countries around the world, the presence of natural resources is, for most of its citizens, a curse. If the elites can draw their wealth directly from the ground, what need do they have of taxation? And without taxation, what need do they have of the people? Their mandate comes from control of the ground, control that can only be gained, can only be held by bestowing favors and by force. The people stand in the way of access to the earth, to the riches beneath the surface. The people demand services, protection, a piece of the wealth under their feet. Power dragged from the earth has no love of the people; they are easier to deal with buried in it than standing on it. For this reason the history of the Congo has been a history of brutality. It has little to do with tribalism and “ancient ethnic hatreds,” the oft-spouted phrase that hides the true nature of the conflict: wealth and power.
    When the Congo was a Belgian colony at the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the personal property of King Leopold II. Using forced labor from the locals, he extracted a fortunefrom the vast territory, which is almost a hundred times the size of little Belgium. It is said in Congo that the streets of Brussels are paved with Congolese gold. The price for this gold was an estimated 10 million human beings dead, due to King Leopold’s policy of destroying crops and villages to quell revolt, forcing men, women, and children into slavery, and the free use of capital punishment.
    After independence from the Belgians in 1960, a U.S.-backed coup ousted the first democratically elected leader of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, and placed the government in the hands of Joseph Désiré Mobutu in 1965. Mobutu was then the Army Chief of Staff. He was to rule for the next thirty-two years, stealing about 4 billion dollars from his country while many of the inhabitants remained some of the poorest people on earth. To describe his style of government, journalists used the term “kleptocracy.”
    He changed his name to the praise name Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa za Banga, and changed the name of his country to Zaire, a Portuguese corruption of the name of the country’s largest river. He created