Certainly.
I think, again, this gets to the work with non-state armed combatants, many of whom are perpetrators of the violence that we're trying to understand here today. One thing that struck me as particularly heartbreaking while working in DRC is that when you talk to many of these rebel commanders and combatants, you're trying to understand what many of us think of as entirely incomprehensible behaviour. It is very intense abuse of civilians and sexual violence against women. Many of us find it incredibly difficult even to hear the descriptions. For me, I think the most challenging thing was recognizing that many of these soldiers had actually witnessed and undergone the very violence that they were then propagating. This is one of the core aspects of the conflict in DRC and one of the most heartbreaking.
Again, returning to that question of the cycle of violence, we often saw both men and women actually joining armed groups as young girls and boys. While some of them were kidnapped and some of them faced intense pressure to join, others joined out of a sense of anger or wanting to protect their communities from the violence that their own families had undergone.
One girl actually talked very eloquently about how she joined a Mai Mai rebel group because she had watched her mother and sister being raped. So her decision to become a soldier was informed by the fact that she had seen this violence occur in her household and she wanted to take up arms in order both to take revenge and to protect others from having to undergo this.
The most heartbreaking thing is that once in an armed group, many soldiers face incredibly horrific and dehumanizing conditions that would challenge our human understanding. I think that changes people and their systematic approaches to creating soldiers who are able to abuse civilians.
This gets us back to the question of how to mentally demobilize soldiers who often have no concept of how to live in civilian communities. While we think that taking away guns means disarmament, what we find is that soldiers who are put back into civilian communities still exhibit the same behaviours they did while they were combatants, involving violence, taking what you want, and preying on civilians. This is incredibly destabilizing for communities in DRC.
Again we get back to that question of how you demobilize the combatants who need to be demobilized. That's through long-term, sustained psychosocial services that are also linked to economic support. Many combatants find that not only can they not find a job, but they don't actually have the social skills to make it in civilian communities. They simply have not learned those skills. Services need to be geared to providing those capacities.
In addition some soldiers actually do choose to remain soldiers and join the national army. However, right now that is not always a positive or sustainable option for getting a salary, making money, and behaving like an honourable soldier. What I think is most interesting in speaking to many of these combatants is that there is this sense of, or longing for, honour and discipline and a sense of structure. It's just not something that they are able to achieve in their current situations.
So if the Congolese government undertook to create a disciplined, well-paid military, there would be an enormous amount of interest from combatants who have a desire to be in an organization like that. Unfortunately, right now that's just simply not the case.