I enjoy killing - child soldier
By Graeme Hosken
Pretoria News
December 22, 2003
http://www.pretorianews.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=313238
"I want to join a bigger and stronger army so that I can carry on killing people and chopping their heads off."
These were the spine-chilling words of 17-year-old Burundi child soldier Captain Jonathan Sinburadayihi.
Sinburadayihi, a former combatant from the rebel group Forces for National Liberation, has been killing people for 10 years.
He began fighting in 1993 when the civil and ethnic war between the Hutus and the Tutsis broke out.
Sinburadayihi, who is at a demobilisation centre outside the Burundi capital Bujumbura, said he enjoyed what he did and wanted to carry on because he was a respected and powerful man.
Asked why he became a soldier, Sinburadayihi said because his family were killed during the Tutsi killings. "If people kill your family you are going to go and kill them.
"To stop their friends from killing you, you kill them in a horrible way so that everyone is scared of you," he said while sitting in the demobilisation centre
set up by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF). More than 1 500 SANDF troops are in Burundi to protect exiled leaders who are returning to the country after a tentative ceasefire was declared, and to man two of the three demobilisation centres in the country.
Sinburadayihi is one of 35 child soldiers and 218 former combatants who have been in the centre for the past five months.
The 218 former fighters are made up of all the once-warring parties, except for one rebel group which has yet to sign the ceasefire.
Sinburadayihi described how he had lost count of the number of people he killed.
"We killed lots of people. Babies, men, women, girls and boys. We killed all of those who would not join us even if they were our friends.
"Our friends who did not join us, we would shoot and that is all, but our enemies we would chop their heads and arms off," he said while pointing in the direction of Kabila forest, where an estimated 20 000 rebels
are still living.
Kabila forest is almost 8km north of the demobilisation camp. This is where much of the fighting took place.
Sinburadayihi said every time he killed someone he marked the killing either on the handle of his machete, or the butt of his AK-47.
Describing how he learnt to be a soldier, he said they were taught by the teenagers and older men. "They taught us how to carry and shoot a gun, how to run and hide in the forests.
"They taught us by making us shoot at trees and rocks with AK-47s and RPGs and big tank guns.
"To chop, we were told to pretend we were cutting down small trees," he said.
Asked what he and the other former-combatant child soldiers wanted to do when the ceasefire was in place, Sinburadayihi said he wanted to join the Burundi Army, "so that we can fight our other enemies and chop them up".
"We are friends with our old enemies and we all want to join the army so we can fight the enemy.
"I would
like to learn to read, but without a gun you cannot lead or have respect and I need respect," says Sinburadayihi while pretending to shoot his war friend, Lieutenant Deodona Ndikumnana (21). - Military Reporter
Published on the web by the Pretoria News on December 22, 2003.
