wfn.org | Presbyterian women in Congo urge sons not to take up weapons

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Note #6205 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

4-October-2000
00343

Presbyterian women in Congo urge sons not to take up weapons

Mothers decry "the violence that comes with being at war"

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE -- "Mama" Monique Misenga Ngoyi Mukuna is weary of soldiers.

	It is no wonder. Back home, in the capital city of Kinshasa in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, she has been caught up in two civil wars in
two years.

	 But soldiers -- some as young as 13 years old -- have been wandering the
streets of Kinshasa for decades, automatic weapons slung over their
shoulders. First there were the bullying, often violent, unpaid and
unpredictable troops of dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who might raid and
demolish a house at any time, without warning, in a search for bread.

	Now there are the Angolans, Zimbabweans, Namibians and Chadians, who are
providing military support to President Laurent Kabila, the leader of the
rebels who overthrew Mobutu three years ago. The foreign troops are there to
fend off invading Ugandans, Rwandans and Burundians, whose ethnic-killing
sprees have thrown central Africa into spasm. Their armed rebels are moving
deep into Congo, seeking tribal retribution, squatting in resource-rich
parts of the country, or both, and trying to oust Kabila.

	Then one must factor in Kabila's own army, which, while better-mannered
than Mobutu's hoodlums, is striving to bolster the presidency of a sagging
leader who has opposed political pluralism and frustrated international
inquiries into the slaughter of refugees in Congo's jungles.

	 Needless to say, both the Congolese and the international community view
Kabila's presidency with undisguised skepticism.

	Truth be told, few Congolese back any of the fighting factions. The
country's intellectual elite would prefer a negotiated settlement in which
no side wins, followed by free and fair elections.

	In the midst of this deadly political nightmare, Bilenga is raising nine
children. When soldiers were armed and roaming the city's streets in the
"bad ole days" of Mobutu, she made her kids play near the house, within
earshot and out of harm's way.

	  But the children are bigger now. The oldest, a boy of 22, is just out of
university.  Bilenga doesn't want him to be a soldier in anybody's army.

	"At the beginning, people were favorable to Kabila," she said, remembering
the rebel's remarkable trek across what was then called Zaire to depose a
despised dictator. In just seven months, Kabila became a national hero.
"But, with the actual situation ... the Congolese have seen they've been
supporting somebody who likes to kill. He (Kabila) began taking the very
young into the military. And parents gave their children, thinking (it was a
way of bringing) hope.

	"Now they understand that they delivered their children to death."

	That is why Kinshasa's Presbyterian church women are organizing mothers to
refuse military service for their sons.

	"We must make women aware they have a right to say no to this kind of
business ... and to counsel their young people not to accept going into the
service," Bilenga said matter-of-factly during the Year 2000 Congo
Consultation here in late September between Congolese and U.S.
Presbyterians.

	Discouraging service in an army with less and less public support doesn't
sound like it would be a tough sell. But a job with rations at the end of
the day is enticing when a young man's belly is growling and there's no food
on the table and no money to buy any, nor much hope of eating tomorrow,
either.

	Oddly, the Congo is one of the richest countries in the world in natural
resources: cobalt, copper, petroleum, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, tin,
uranium, iron ore, coal. And that doesn't even exhaust the list. However,
most Congolese families scrape by on subsistence farming and petty trade,
and Congo's per-capita income ranks among the lowest in the world.

	Life is so tough that, in the Year 2000, the average life expectancy of a
Congolese adult is in the mid-40s.

	"We need peace. We need a change. We need these (armies) to go out," said
the Rev. Dr. Mulumba M. Mukundi, general secretary of the Presbyterian
Community of Congo, headquartered in the Kasai, the mineral-rich center of
the Congo. Mukundi watched parents wave good-bye to the young men and boys
who signed up to join Kabila's army of supposed liberators amidst the
euphoria of his 1997 victory.

	 But they regret it now, Mukundi said. 

	"Many parents thought it was a good thing. It was a job. It paid. A good
situation," Mukundi said. "But they found the opposite. These guys went off
to different places, didn't have enough to eat, and died."

	What's more, the army isn't forthcoming about what has happened to recruits
gone missing. And since the consequences of protesting army decisions are
not clear, most parents stay quietly frantic. Or else they send a minister
to ask an officer information, usually to no avail.

	Mukundi told the Presbyterian News Service that the best pastoral advice he
has been able to provide is: "Keep praying for your child. If he's alive,
he'll come back. If he not alive, it is finished."

	That's not an answer any mother desires — or deserves, said Mukuna, who
directs the Women and Children's Department of the Presbyterian Community of
Kinshasa, a large and still-growing denomination with ministries in Kinshasa
and in the provinces of Bandundu and Lower Congo.

	That is why she is so vocal about mothers steering their sons away from
warfare — an idea reinforced by the World Council of Churches' campaign
called the Decade to Overcome Violence, to which Mukuna was exposed during
the WCC General Assembly in Harare, Zimbabwe, about two years ago. The WCC
also committed itself to working to end the recruitment of child soldiers
and to de-mobilize army units that include child soldiers. About 300,000
boys under 18 years of age are now serving in militaries around the world.

	"Now we're more able to counsel boys to refuse (military) service ... to
pursue studies,if they can. If they cannot pay for school, then start a
small business," Mukuna told PNS, conceding that, in war-torn Congo, many
think that the only sure way to get a hot meal is to join the army. "Bt
we've decided to fight against violence in any form ... most strongly, the
violence that comes with being at war."

	It is not just the pragmatics of dying or disappearing, or, even enlisting
to get food -- which may not be part of the bargain once the papers are
signed -- that is spurring the church's Women's Department on, she says.

	The mothers do not want their sons killed. But they also do not want them
to kill.

	"This is not so much a statement against the government (as) a statement
for life," Mukuna said, noting that the church is in the business of
protecting lives. "The biblical analysis says that to take a life is sin.
And if a child goes off to war and has a gun, he might be put in a situation
where he has to kill ... (and be) led into sin.

	"Not to mention getting killed themselves," Mukuna went on. "Killing
another Congolese adds to the sin."

	Nearby, the Rev. Tshimungu Mayela Josue, general secretary of the Kinshasan
church, added in his soft-spoken way: "This is a useless war."

	Josue acknowledged that it is church women who have been outspoken about
keeping young men out of the violence. He also observed that Kabila has said
publically that he intends to discharge child-soldiers.

	While more disciplined than Mobutu's troops, the occupying armies in Congo
kill in more ways than one. There's AIDS. And there's the spiritual malaise
that comes upon those who compromise deeply held values out of desperation,
as when they are without food.

	The Rev. Bope Mikobi, of the Presbyterian Community of Congo, said he has
seen it all too often: Young women are raped by soldiers with HIV. Others
are bribed to swap sex for food -- a can of sardines or some cookies.

	"The entire church is aware, engaged and conscious of the problems," Mikobi
told participants in a 2000 Congo Consultation table. "The point that
weakens our whole life is hunger.

	"Even in spite of the education she has received (about sexually
transmitted diseases or sexual morality), if a woman goes down the street
and she's hungry and a soldier offers her food or a one-dollar bill, she's
gonna take it."

	In some areas it is even worse.

	Reports are coming out of Kabinda, in the east Kasai, and Sankuru, in the
north, that rebel armies are torturing and killing people, singling out
intellectuals. "It's overwhelming," said the Rev. Mbaya Tshiakani, who
pastors in Mbuji-Mayi in the East Kasai, describing horrors that haven't yet
been documented in the occupied areas, and turmoil in regions like his own,
where food is short, soldiers are swarming through villages and roads are
blocked to prevent easy movement within provinces.

	"The population is not behind Kabila or the rebels," he said. "Something
needs to be done to get the troops out so there is no (military) victory --
neither on Kabila's side nor the rebels'," said Tshiakani, who lobbied the
Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) hard to prod U.S. diplomats to make it a
priority to get the occupying troops out of Congo, to get United Nations'
peacekeepers in, and to hold free elections. "(That would be)," he said, "a
victory for the population."

	Mukuna agrees that the armies have to go if Congo is to regain stability,
not to mention its sanity. But in the meantime, she says, the church's women
have a role to play: sensitizing people to block aggression in more basic
ways.

	"We must refuse first," she said.  "That must come from us."

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