MOZAMBIQUE: Healing the trauma of conflict

The boys started arriving late in the day and stuck to the fringes of the community theatre, out of earshot of the painful personal testimonies being recounted of the war fought on Ilha Josina Machel - a conflict which touched everyone in this run-down town of some 10,000 people. The boys, adolescents now, were the child soldiers of the former rebel movement Renamo. They had been kidnapped, brutalised, and forced to kill in a campaign by the apartheid South Africa-backed Renamo to control Ilha Josina Machel, a strategic island in the Nkomati river, around 100 km from the capital Maputo. The children were Renamo shock troops. Lost to their families and culture, they were responsible for some of the worst attrocities of a bitter war. Then in 1994, with the signing of a peace agreement and demobilisation, 150 boys came back home to the community they had terrorised. Both victims and victimisers had been traumatised by the conflict. Traditional order and value systems had been torn apart. Boys had been turned into killers, kidnapped girls into sex slaves, parents made powerless, and the local economy devastated. But the children were welcomed back. The Mozambican NGO Reconstruindo a Esperanca (Rebuilding Hope- RE) works with the community on Ilha Josina Machel in a process of healing. The project has three dimensions: psychotherapy in group and individual settings, social health work, and vocational and literacy training. According to Dr Ephraim Boia who heads the programme, unlike western approaches, RE is a holistic intervention which apart from individual help is tied to the community and its economic well-being as a whole. It is difficult to quantify success, but in qualitative terms we see self- confidence and respect return to families and social interactions. They are better able to look after themselves economically, he told IRIN. One of the key aspects of work is that it cooperates closely with traditional healers and religious leaders. All the children that returned to Ilha Josina Machel went through cleansing rituals to clean their minds of what they saw,the local Bishop of the African church on the island said. We clean so that they can forget,which in turn allows the community to forgive, he added. The Bishop, who himself was shot by Renamo, had his son kidnapped and did not know he was alive until he returned in 1994. When I see a child and know he was a soldier Im not meant to hate him because I know he was forced to do all that,he told IRIN. I don't want to talk about the war but our recovery, which with flooding this year, and little money in the area, is perilous enough. Another man, who was used by Renamo as a porter and twice escaped, also works with RE in the community. He still sees some of the children who held him captive and on one occasion urged that he be killed. One comes to visit, and I have a feeling I would like to ask him why he made me suffer.But the injunction against raising the past prevents that. Instead, the man added: Maybe the work Im doing, helping myself and other kids, is my way of coping with my problems. RE has two other programmes in Nampula and Gaza provinces helping not just Renamo ex-soldiers but children who were in government militias, and the anti-Renamo and traditionally-based Naparema forces - as well as abused girls. But, Boia points out, there are thousands more children in Mozambique who RE has been unable to reach, and continue to live with the trauma and memories of the war unaddressed. See related IRIN-SA report MOZAMBIQUE: Opposition to compulsory army recruitment