Johann Hari: Distraught parents and terrified children

The pictures of a small, smiling Madeleine McCann that are plastered across Britain and Portugal today never fail to do it. They always give me a slap-in-the-face flashback to a place where it is not an exception to have your child stolen away - to abuse you can't stop imagining. No, it is an everyday event.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, more than 70,000 children have been seized at gunpoint by militias in the past six years. Each one of those children is as terrified as Madeleine, and each one of their parents is as wrought and desperate as the McCanns.

As I travelled through the trashed Congolese warzones last year, in every shell-village there was a slew of grief-wrecked mothers. One, a lined, stooped 29-year-old called Marie-Jean, told me simply: "The Mai-Mai [one of the militias] came and stole my babies last year. They raided our village and shot my husband and took my kids away at gunpoint. Two boys and a little girl. The oldest is 11, the youngest is 7... We hear stories about what happens. The boys will be soldiers now. The girl..."

She couldn't finish the sentence. She knew that the girls are taken as "wives" by the militiamen and repeatedly raped. If they try to escape they are whipped, often to death.

These kidnapping militiamen are, in effect, working for us. The war in Congo - the deadliest since Hitler marched across Europe, claiming four million lives in the past six years - has been a war for the resources that make our technological society zing and bling.

These militia are pillaging Congo's gold and diamonds and coltan - the metal in your mobile, your laptop, your remote control - and selling them on to us in the rich world. It is why they fight. The UN calls them "armies of business". The war still stutters on in the East, killing 1,200 people every day.

Some people are getting sniffy about the reaction to Madeleine's kidnapping, seeing it as a Dianafied act of mass hysteria. I don't agree. We should never be snobbish about spontaneous shows of solidarity with suffering strangers; they are what keep us human. But we should try to spread that solidarity ever-wider, to other mothers pining for their stolen babies across the world.

There isn't, alas, much we can do to help the McCanns now. Yet if every person who has lit a candle for Madeleine gives just £5 to Warchild and joins the campaign to save the Congo, we can help thousands of Congolese parents like the McCanns.

In Bukavu, a wrecked mud-city, I tried to find out what was happening to the snatched Madeleines who were lucky enough to escape the hands of the militias. Some had been "demobilised" as part of the official peace process where the various militias are being slowly smelted into one large national army. Some had run away, escaping the whip.

Most end up as streetchildren, robbing for a living and sleeping in the dirt. I visited the "lucky" ones, who make it into an orphanage, even though most have living parents who they couldn't reach. It was a string of three large crumbling white buildings, with emaciated kids tumbling and dashing about, screaming merrily.

After being shown around, I asked what the last building, which they steered me away from, was for. "That's the morgue," my guide said. "We send about three children a week there." Their parents never find out that their kids survived, for a while.

Then I went to meet the children who were genuinely lucky - or as lucky as you get in these circumstances. They had made it into the centres for child soldiers set up by Warchild, a Dutch charity dedicated to rehabilitating child soldiers.

There I learned what happened to them after they were kidnapped. A 15-year-old boy called Kolonzo talked blankly about "taking out" a village full of civilians on his 13th birthday. The militia had given him drugs and trained him up to rape and kill.

But he still dreamed about his family through it all, and he has a heroic story about how all this fighting has been for their sake. "My mother was kidnapped by the Mai-Mai," he says, "so I went and joined the Mai-Mai forces, even though I hated them, so I could find her and save her and we could go back to living in our village with my sisters."

When Kolonzo leaves the room to go back to kicking around a ball with his mates like any teenager anywhere the orphanage director tells me, "It is not true. All the boys invent stories like this, because they are ashamed to have been kidnapped and brainwashed. The stories are a way of keeping some kind of connection with their family."

The orphanage is tracing Kolonzo's mother - not easy in a country where millions have been scattered and displaced by war. They will keep on trying to make his dream of return finally come true. Every week, children leave here to return to their parents at last.

For some of the kids, it's not so simple. In order to stop the child-warriors from escaping and running back home, several militias adopted a new tactic. As they captured a child, they would force him to murder a relative - usually their father or mother - so the family would never accept him back.

I watched the scrambling, gangly kids playing football and wondered which ones had been forced to murder their mums.

Since we caused this war through our unhindered greed, we have a responsibility to put it right. The first step is to give money so we can finally reunite these children with their parents. The best charities doing this are the Red Cross (www.redcross.org.uk) and Warchild (www.warchild.org.uk).

But we also have a responsibility to bring the businesses who fuelled and funded the Congolese war to justice. The UN advised national governments to investigate some of the biggest names in British and American finance for their role, including Barclays and Anglo-American. Yet the investigation was derisory.

The companies named by the UN should be investigated now, and any guilty CEOs should be tried in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. It will take a lot of public pressure to change our governments' priorities so drastically - especially since they are engaged in resource-looting of their own in Iraq - but if enough of us demand it, it can be done.

We comfort ourselves by imagining that while the McCanns are People Like Us, women like Marie-Jean are somehow different, hardened by the horror of the rest of their lives. But when you look into their eyes, you see that Kolonzo and the stolen children of Congo mean just as much as Madeleine.

j.hari@independent.co.uk

More from Johann Hari