"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.
'You kill them in a horrible way' 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.
Continues Below ↓
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 guard 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.
'Without a gun you cannot lead or have respect' 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.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
