South Sudan’s child soldiers try to adjust to civilian life

RUMBEK, Sudan, Jan 20 (AFP) — Abraham Mabor looks like any other teacher at the Deng Nhial primary school in southern Sudan. But the 25-year-old is one of thousands who served as child soldiers in the region’s devastating two-decade-long civil war.

Sudanese boys, former soldiers for Sudan People’s Liberation Army, sit in their classroom in the Deng Nhial Primary School in Rumbek, South Sudan. (AFP).

Demoblized from the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army in 1999, he is now in the third year of secondary school and spends his free time teaching agriculture to fellow southerners whose childhoods were blighted by military service.

“I was 15 years old when I joined the SPLA and I began fighting three years later,” Mabor told AFP in the region’s bombed out provisional capital of Rumbek.

“The Arabs murdered my parents and I wanted revenge. I was not conscripted.”

Mabor was wounded twice. In 1997, a bullet scratched his side during fighting for the town of Yei near the Ugandan border, while the following year he was shot in the head during a skirmish with Arab militiamen.

But, unlike many fellow underage recruits, at least he escaped with his life.

The SPLA used thousands of child soldiers, girls as well as boys, in its 22-year war against successive regimes in Khartoum, some of them as young as 10 when they first took to the bush.

Life was often tough for the child guerrillas — forced to travel barefoot over long distances and to go for days without food, they also had to contend with the horror of seeing their young friends killed or maimed.

But at the end of the 1990s, under growing pressure from the international community, the SPLA began demobilizing its underage recruits.

Around 200 of the 830 pupils at Deng Nhial primary school are former young warriors, something that Mabor says motivates him in his teaching.

“They are demobilized child soldiers and my brothers,” he told AFP.

Some of his pupils still have difficulty coming to grips with the loss of loved ones and hold grudges against the people they hold responsible.

David Chol Manyiel, still in the sixth grade of primary school at the age of 20, recalled how he joined the rebels at the age of 13 after Arab militiamen raided his village, murdering some of his family and abducting his father.

For the first two years he was employed carrying water to the frontlines, but at the age of 15 he became a fully fledged fighter.

“I am happy to be in school,” Manyiel said, adding that his ambition remained to pilot helicopter gunships of the sort that the Sudanese military used against the rebels and their civilian sympathisers.

Deborah Achot is only 15 but she too joined the guerrillas after losing track of her family during a government air raid against her village.

“I still have no idea where my parents are,” she said.

After wandering in the bush for two days, she ran into SPLA soldiers who took her in and looked after her. In return, she cooked for the fighters and fetched water for them from nearby rivers.

“I did not fight,” she stressed.

The pupils say they have the SPLA’s Bahr al-Ghazal regional commander to thank for being out of the rebel army and in school.

He was among the first commanders to start weeding out child guerrillas and sending them to school.

In 2000, the rebels’ chief of staff, Salva Kiir Mayardit, finally announced a general demobilization of all underage recruits.

“I would like to reiterate the SPLM’s commitment not to recruit into its armed forces children below the age of 18, to demobilize all child soldiers still remaining in the military and to hand them over for reintegration to the competent civil authorities,” he said in an order to field commanders.

The primary school’s deputy head Zakaria Bol Jallab said that, to begin with, many of the former guerrillas found it hard to adjust after the brutalities of war. “They fought all the time and had difficulty coping,” he said.

But eventually they made the transition from gun to pen and developed a desire to learn. “Now they understand the benefit of education,” said Jallab.

And they have former comrades like Mabor to look up to as an example.